I said that Furuno's new products had to be pretty damn Earth shattering to live up to the hype and secrecy floating around before Wednesday's grand introduction.

Based on my own impression and the collective oohs and aahs of the journalists and dealers in the crowd, NAVnet 3D was the belle of the ball. Without a doubt, Furuno has defined a new paradigm for what a chart plotter should look like and how it should operate.

In other words, it easily lived up to the hype.

The biggest problem with Navnet 1 and Navnet 2 was that the chart plotter was very weak. The graphics looked like they were circa 1984 Space Invaders and the user interface was cumbersome to say the least.

The other problem was speed. Zooming in and out and scrolling around the charts was excrutiatingly slow.

Finally, the single video input was ho hum and eclipsed by most other competing products.

The radar and sounder applications were good, as is generally Furuno's M.O.

So with this in mind, Furuno turned to their new business partners in France, MaxSea, to completely redesign the user interface and chart plotter application. This left the Japanese engineers to continue to improve on their already superior radar and sounders.

NavNet 3D is a global product. Engineered in Japan and France under the direction of product developers in the U.S., the product was coordinated to allow the right people to do what they do best.

So the first question likely to come out of a prospective buyers mouth is, "what charts does it use?" The easy answer is, "who cares?" There's no point in thinking Navionics or C-Map with this produt because all the charts are already embedded in the hard drive and they are a combination of bathymetric, S57 NOAA charts and Navionics, along with a Google Earth-type interface called Satellite Photofusion that renderes all the photos in real time and simultaneously, depending on the angle of view.

In other words, you get what's there, but if you don't like what's there, especially at the expense of a Navionics or C-Map chart as you know them today, then you are a tough customer.

By the way, the 2-D raster chart overhead view we are used to is available on 3D also, so you can go old school if you like.

To give you the best idea of what the chart looks like, picture Google Earth in full 3D mode with the ability to drop underwater also.

While this perspective has been available on Garmin's 4000 and 5000 series, as well as Raymarine E-Series, NavNet 3D is light years ahead. The TimeZero technology that, like Google Earth, is seemless as you scroll and zoom is a huge step above the aformentioned products.

Furthermore, 3D's ability to navigate in real time, at any perspective, hasn't been seen before. You can place waypoints and routes over the chart at any view. You can also overlay the radar at any view, meaning the 3D perspective looks like you're looking out your forward window and targets will be out in front as they truly are.

It's not there yet, but I was told there will be a 3D fishfinder interface eventually in which fish targets will also appear in the 3D perspective.

The new RotoKey, compared here before to BMW's iDrive, is very easy to use and is almost more video game joystick then knob.

This brings me to another point. NavNet 3D is more than just great software added to a standard platform. The fact is, Furuno is the first company to bring video gaming technology to marine navigation equipment. NavNet 3D is more XBox than it is computer. It has controls, namely the RotoKey and scroll pad, that are standard on gaming console remotes. It has high-end video graphics and the graphics card to make them possible.

If you look at Halo on an XBox, it is so far superior in look and feel than a NavNet 2 chart plotter, you wonder why this hasn't been done by Furuno and every other manufacturer 5 years ago. Now, they are doing it.

Some of the TimeZero controls are also brought over to the radar application. You haven't seen a radar like this before. Not that the targets and general 2D radar look isn't the same, but the ability to zoom and scroll around the radar screen like on the plotter, was much different. As a matter of fact, it wasn't comfortable in this case because it was easy to lose your own position on the screen. There's a "Ship" button to always bring you back to center, so that will be used a lot on the radar.

There are two completely different ranges available from a single radar. You can even control the clutter and gain independently. Apparently the radar will spin at 24, 36 and 48 RPM's and will change automatically depending on your range settings.

So there's a taste. Kudos to Furuno and MaxSea for a job well done.