A Lot Happening in the 3D Space

Last week a lot of 3D news occurred, here is a round up of some of the highlights:

• I stopped by the ASTD booth of Digitell, Inc. and met James A. Parker, the President, who said his booth was buzzing the entire conference and a lot of people were interested in 3D webinars. Digitell is company that owns VirtualU a 3D virtual immersive environment that has been used for everything from meetings to rock concerts. Learn more about their 3D solution here.
• As announced first on this blog, ProtonMedia announced a strategic partnership with RWD on heals of another announcement of a strategic partnership with Kaplan-EduNeering. I think these two activities signal a real “serious” look at moving 3D virtual immersive environments into organizations at the enterprise level. Stay tuned for more big announcements in the enterprise space for 3D virtual worlds.
• ThinkingWorlds, the 3D simulations software created by Caspian Learning, just announced a joint venture with Bohemia Interactive, a well known military simulations company with the VBS2 engine also known as Virtual Battlespace 2. VBS2 is a fully interactive, three-dimensional, PC-based synthetic environment specifically developed for military training, mission rehearsal and analysis.According to Chris Chris Brannigan, of Caspian, the “main driver of the partnership is to bring rapid authoring and thin client delivery to VBS2 and therefore into the military simulations arena.”
• Additionally, ThinkingWorlds announced they are bringing immersive simulations through Java applets to the browser. ThinkingWorlds demonstrated this capability at ITEC Conference in London. The capability is currently in testing with military clients and over the next month Caspian will add in SCORM and other functionality. Java gives the ThinkingWorlds application many advantages for delivery – it is almost ubiquitous, it can be delivered securely and it is very portable and easy to host by any client.
• Linden Labs, makers of Second Life, announce the list of the Top Ten: 2010 Linden Prize Finalists. The prize recognizes a Second Life Resident, or team, for an innovative inworld project that improves the way people work, learn, and communicate in their daily lives outside of the virtual world. There were 130 finalists and I am happy to say our friends at the Uncle D’s Storyquest project are among the finalists. I visited with them a few months ago and blogged about it in Using Virtual Worlds in the Conspiracy to Create an ah-ha Moment so congratulations to Marty and Jena.
• Sue Todd, president of Corporate University Xchange— leading provider of corporate university research, benchmarking, and advisory services for helping organizations transform corporate learning–wrote an interesting piece she calls Long Live 3D Learning where she discusses three encounters she’s had lately with the concept of 3D for learning and collaboration. She ends her post with Improved performance. Stronger ROI. More and better education. Yes 3D Learning – it’s looking like you have a bright future ahead.

It looks like things are happening in the 3D space, to learn about important aspects of 3D check out my post at The Tech Dimension called Three Things to Know about Learning in 3D Environments to gain additional understanding of why 3D is starting to take hold. __ Catalog of Recommended Books, Games and Gadgets Recommended Games and Gadgets Recommended Books Content Guide