Damn, IBM has just released the Ad we would have loved to have done ! ☺
I guess the main message is “ Stop talking about what your company could do in Virtual Worlds… and just do it!”
This is exactly what we thought, about a year ago, at Stonfield InWorld. Since we started this company, we have explored many Virtual Worlds, set up some great events in-world, designed some superb places… and more than that, we have provided some Virtual World solutions where we even talked about Return on Investment with our clients!
Of course, we sometimes took the wrong road ( which prevented us from taking our clients there !), but, above all, we really pushed ahead with our two favorite topics: e-Learning and e-Commerce.
The ITC Project (Immersive Training Center) is well on its way, as is the Shopping Attitude project (e-Commerce), which is close to being released !
IBM is leader in practically all the markets the company targets. The Company’s very last news from Virtual Worlds 2008 in New-York yesterday are awesome. IBM is also Stonfield InWorld’s client, often its business partner and sometimes its supplier. We have dozens of friends there (and maybe even one of my best friends !) and are honored to have this excellent business relationship.
But at the end of the day, what makes me more excited with this note is the determination of the first IT company in the world, to evangelize a market that so few of us understand and support.
When Stonfield InWorld says “Virtual Worlds are one of the Kill Apps of the Internet of the Future” , I can understand some people don’t trust us so easily… but when IBM says that, people should ask themselves why is Big Blue so confident ?
By the way, I would like to quote a young guy, retired from the IT market, who said some months ago in Paris – France : “We are going to bring the Web from the second to the third dimension, a dimension where you’ll be able to walk through cities, shops…” Bill Gates.
Euh… Bill ? I know you were wainting for us but we are ready now, you can start moving !
OpenSimulator, a project well known as OpenSim, has just found significant and active support from RealXtend, a joint-venture between two Swedish 3D specialists.
If the video doesn’t make you see why it’s so important for Virtual Worlds’ future, then check out this Road Map.
Under testing for the next release (29th of February 2008)
* Free-form non-humanoid avatars * Global avatar mesh, skeleton, textures, attachments and animations * Single sign-on to multiple worlds for teleporting * Avatar generator * Avatar attachment tool to help set 3D meshes to different bones * Unlimited amount of attachments per bone * Teleports between realXtend and Secondlife * Avatar storage to move avatar appearance between realXtend grids/worlds * Mesh tool to scale and set pivot of 3d models * Server launcher and configuration application * Home automation example using X10 technology * Bot with Python scripting * Media library for world builders * Server status window
Roadmapped features
* Direct3D rendering for better performance * Support for OGG Vorbis * Support for video (other than quicktime) * Avatar generator and attachment tool integration to rexViewer * OGRE materials support * Procedural textures to reduce network load * On-the-fly compression for mesh up/downloading to reduce network load * Client side prediction * Improvements to in-world building tools * Avatar off-line mode, with scriptable behaviour * Texture projectors * Weather support * Integration with skype/google spreadsheets/openoffice * Inverse kinematics * Avatar face/head animation based on live video camera data * Lip synch for VOIP * Cloth physics * Vehicles’ support * Global rights management for objects in distributed architecture (you can set rights for objects as in SL) * Wallet and transactions
Clearly, OpenSim will accelarate its development before Summer 2008. It’s definitely another - huge - step towards interoperability.
At Stonfield InWorld, we are following this progress closely as well as carrying out our own work on this topic. Our main concerns are business uses such as e-Learning, e-Commerce or Collaborative Work…
Take a look at these two tutorials below…
The first one is about including a VNC screen directly in RealXtend and the second one shows how to import objects directly from Maya. Our team did that two weeks ago, on Stonfield’s RealXtend servers.
By the way, many thanks to the RealXtend Tech Team for their awesome work !
Since launching Stonfield InWorld last year, we have definitively decided to communicate for real with you (the World), and not only send press releases about the company news.
Stonfield InWorld is a French agency specializing in Virtual Worlds.
More than just saying what we do, we wanted to tell you more about our culture and our values, to share some interesting stuff directly from our labs, to challenge our ideas, to present some business cases and the amazing projects we’re creating for our clients, …
And we did it !
But in French
As most of the people involved in Virtual Worlds do not speak French as we do, we thought about two solutions : You have to learn French or we have to blog in English.
After many months of meetings and conference calls to decide which one of these two solutions would be the most efficient, we decided to launch this blog.
But to get you started, you may need some keywords to subscribe to this blog ?
Hi there !