Reading, Mass - April 18, 2000--Actuality Systems, Inc., a startup developing three-dimensional "floating image" display technology, announced today that it has closed its seed round of funding and has created an Advisory Board.

Actuality has attracted two initial members to its Advisory Board. Jim Baum, EVP of Engineering Research and Development of Parametric Technology Corporation, is lending considerable MCAD market knowledge to the team. At PTC, Mr. Baum's current responsibilities include technical product marketing, strategy, development, and delivery functions for all of PTC's products including flexible engineering and collaborative product commerce applications.

Also joining the Advisory Board is Dr. Michael Hercher, VP of Research and Development of OPTRA, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester's Institute of Optics in 1963. He stayed there for 11 years, becoming a Professor and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies in the College of Engineering. He was a founder and VP for R&D of Coherent Optics, which marketed the first tunable dye laser in the early 1970s. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, holder of more than a dozen patents on optical instruments, and has published 70+ papers on optical instrument design, interferometry, and metrology.

A spinoff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's $50k Entrepreneurship Competition, Actuality Systems Inc. was incorporated in 1997 when founder Gregg Favalora left Harvard's graduate school. Rob Ryan, founder and former CEO of Ascend Communications, Inc., became Actuality's Chairman in 1998. In December, 1999, the group received $1.5 million in seed funding from private and venture investors including NetVentures LLC, Point West Ventures, and angel investors affiliated with the Audax Group. In January 2000, the company moved out of Favalora's basement in Cambridge and into an office in Reading, with a team of engineers from Harvard, Yale, MIT, and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

About Actuality Systems, Inc.

Actuality develops volumetric display technology for molecular visualization and mechanical CAD. The display, connected to the user's computer, produces volume-filling 3-D imagery which appears to float inside a transparent viewing dome. Actuality's 3-D display may be seen without cumbersome goggles, and the imagery may be seen by multiple viewers a full 360 degrees around the room. See http://www.actuality-systems.com for details.