Virtual environments hit the main stream
While high-end researchers are looking at ways to integrate 3D visual effects and haptic technology into virtual environments, Web based collaborative software, from multi-player games to corporate software suites are making their presence felt online.
Packages such as IBM's Lotus Sametime, which has chalked up seven million users worldwide, take real-time messaging into a range of applications, including real-time e-meetings, and multi-user interactive presentations based on Microsoft Powerpoint files. The most sophisticated software currently in use is integrated Web services information provision and translation software enabling multi-lingual groups to participate in the same virtual meeting.
Not shy of "eating its own dog-food" IBM claims to save US$4 million per month conducting 8000 e-meetings using the Lotus Sametime suite. With a quarter of a million company based users, the package connects upwards of 80,000 users at any given time.
"The finance and banking sectors have been the early adopters at this stage," explains Lotus software market manager for IBM Australia Lisa Kinter. "It is also used by major security organisations such as the FBI, CIA as well as Naval fleets around the world because all the messages are protected by strong encryption."
In the corporate sector similar suites are also increasingly used as the basis for online education suites and virtual classrooms.
Meanwhile Forrester Research predicts that by 2005 nearly 50 million households in the US will be logged onto multiple real-time games, with hardware revenues topping US$9.4 billion by 2005 while software and content revenue reaches US$16.9 billion.
Multi-player features initially designed for the LAN environment have seen millions of people all over the world log onto games such as Doom, Counterstrike, Command and Conquer, and Quake.
Vizlab's Whitehouse says the games industry has always been at the forefront of software development of multi-users virtual environments.
"The games industry is really driving the whole industry, from the drivers to the graphics," Whitehouse says. "A lot of big graphics companies used to make a lot of money selling high-end machines."
However, the fast and furious nature of the games industry will also provide a steady talent stream into other areas of shared virtual environment development.
"In some ways shared virtual environments in other sectors are overshadowed by the glamour industries of graphics for film and games," Whitehouse says. "But the people who will work creating virtual environments into other areas are often those that are burnt out from spending time in the games industry."
