Let me tell you the story of a great challenge : showing how high technology products such as Saint Gobain’s ones could be so useful to the world as they are… transparent !
We decided to create some animations that are clear enough to explain what a transparent product is made for… Please feel free to come and visit us in Saint-Gobain Glass’ building.
In fact, to be honest, the main reason SGG is now in Second Life is to share ideas and invent their next generation of products with a great focus on sustainable development. We’ve already planned to run virtual meetings between SGG’s experts and eco-friendly resident. The idea for SGG’s experts is to share about their products and technology, and to collect comments or ideas on how the next generation products should be, to take into account even more than today the carbon footprint issue. The residents’ feedback will be very useful for both Saint-Gobain Glass’ Marketing and Research & Development Departments.
By the way, other actions are already intended, starting in September 2008, with virtual/real actions for the preservation of our planet.
Please stay tuned if you are interested in this kind of projects…
Matthew Tyas (aka Bobby Ritt), who’s our Artistic Director at Stonfield InWorld, is talking about Machinimas with Natty Foggarty on Orange Island.
As I’m often working with him on many virtual worlds projects, I can confirm all what he said, especially :
My work is very hard to define, but cheap and cheerful would be a quick way to classify it. All my work is based on concepts, some are obvious, and some are only known to myself.
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 !
News Linden Lab ® is rich at the moment and I have to say that if I continue to believe that “the Second Life ® virtual world” remains an important piece of métaverse which is being built at this time, I begin to have anyway slight doubts.
Good joke of the day is called Second Life brand center, a gem announces today on the blog “the Second Life ® virtual world.” To sum ,it comes to Linden Lab ® to protect its brand with the creation of a kind of label InSLtm and a logo designed to replace the famous eye-in-hand well known to all lovers of “the Second Life ® Virtual World. ”
But don’t panic, the eye-in-hand does not disappear, it is just useless by any site, any business, any brand whose activities are related to “the Second Life ® virtual world” and should be replaced by the wonderful logo eggs in the night:
As pointed out so well Forest, a sort of « seen on TV. »
Fortunately, in its generosity, the gods give 90 days to mortals to update. It is therefore necessary to remove the logo, replacing mentions SL, Second Life and secondlife “the Second Life ® virtual world” or “X,” and also turn the terms of url .. good luck.
What does I think about it??I feel pity
That was still one of the charms of “the Second Life ® virtual world”, which was the creativity of its residents, which gave (recall it during all these years) talent to build “the Second Life ® virtual world , “is simply demolished. There was a time when you could even earn some $ Linden when a visitor came from your site inworld to spend his money … So game over today … Small blogger, you can still send traffic at “the Second Life ® virtual world,” but now you do not sully the brand by displaying the wonderful eye-in-hand on your digital rag but you can use the inSL with no bounds. Thanks, really generous!
Protecting its brand of rabble when it was built primarily thanks to the participation, creativity and talent of the same rabble is a real treason … And to betray its customers is a suicidal attitude.
First consequence for Stonfield InWorld, Shopping Attitude, “private sales” the Second Life ® virtual world “could become Attitude Shopping for example” e-commerce in the métaverse “but certainly not InSLtm.
The year 2008 might be interesting, and if I continue to believe in “the Second Life ® virtual world”, I will, or rather we will continue to spend a little time finding some solutions released from this straitjacket.
Well I have some modifications to make on this blog, all these TM, ® get me tired already … In the future I think I will talk more about There, Hipihi, Multiverse, Vast Park, Twinity, Opensim, realXtend, the list goes on and the best …
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 !