In my post on the launch of Second Life’s Enterprise extension, I said that I assumed one of their motives for moving on it at this point was the fact that other business applications will shortly be coming online. Soon fter that, we received news from one of the companies that sponsors the Designing Worlds show that they were launching their own web-based virtual world application, the ECO – Grid Business Meeting Solution, aimed at the business customer.
Their aim to to provide the first solution that combines security with a web browser based 3D persistent immersive environment, and believe that it is the first web browser based 3D persistent immersive environment solution that businesses will be able to use in a common web browser.
Their press release states:
The ECO-Grid Business Meeting Solution is currently supported in an Internet Explorer web browser version 6 and higher on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 Operating Systems.
Andrew Chapman (Avatar: AWM Mars), technical director of V-Innovate Limited, says: “V-Innovate Limited is one of the first companies that achieves the important next evolutionary step in virtual meeting solution through a web browser base. Only this will ensure ‘real’ hyper grid possibility as we already know it from the 2D solutions, such as websites or Web 2.0 solutions such as Twitter. With ECO – Grid Business Meeting solutions, businesses that have already experienced the power of security systems on their internet, as well as their intranet, will have no trouble or concern to step into the ECO – Grid Business Meeting Solution.
V-Innovate Limited has made sure that all standard security protocols and procedures have been actively adopted in the ECO – Grid Business Meeting Solution. We have even in some instances increased the security policies to the maximum currently available. These security measurements are in use by military organisations such as the British Army or the Royal Air Force. We are proud to have achieved such security protocol now for our ECO – Grid Business Meeting Solution customers.”
Not only security is on the mind of V-Innovate Limited. As Marcus Kretschmer (Avatar: Marc Montague) is mentioning: “V-Innovate Limited is offering to its customer base the well known experience of a web meeting solution with the effect of the 3D persistent immersive environment, which will make sure that customers using V-Innovate Limited’s ECO – Grid Business Meeting Solution, have a relaxed and focused time inside the environment, which will show a very established meeting situation in which our customers feel right at home. Meetings are easy to book through the V-Innovate website http://www.v-innovate.com by a few mouse clicks. Each individual ECO – Grid Business Meeting Solutions participant will get an e-mail invitation into their personal e-mail inbox, which will carry all details to sign into the business meeting. By clicking the link in the e-mail, the ECO-Grid Business Meeting Solution starts its life in an Internet Explorer Browser. This will save time, cost and travelling between offices or even countries. I am very happy to advise that the ‘water cooler’ effect is still persistent in the ECO – Grid environment. Customers will have and have already used the time after the meeting finished to stay in the ECO – Grid meeting space to discuss ‘off topic’ subjects that would mostly get lost in a purely 2D web meeting environment. This shows the powerful synergy between the easy to use web meeting solution and the power of the social network of a 3D persistent immersive environment.”
V-Innovate Limited’s ECO – Grid Business Meeting Solution can be currently experienced in the free demo trial. The visitor just needs to download a single one-time plug-in for their Internet Explorer Browser, which is conveniently available on the V-innovate Limited plug-in website. This plug-in website can be found in a very logical way. Once you have displayed the home page http://www.v-innovate.com, press the button “Try Our Demo World Today!” and the plug-in download page will be displayed. Choose the plug-in for the Internet Explorer web browser and install it. If at any instance the installation process should become interrupted the help website http://www.v-innovate.com/website/help/ contains explanations for the plug-in installation for the Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 using Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 Operating Systems.
If you would like more information about our release of the ECO-Grid Business Meeting Solution please contact Marcus Kretschmer (Avatar: Marc Montague in Second Life™) or Andrew Chapman (Avatar: AWM Mars in Second Life™). If you would like to arrange an interview with our directors please contact in SKYPE: pixie tungl (Avatar: Pixie Tungl in Second Life™).
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With this tempting offer, Aisling Sincliar (Prim Perfect and Designing Worlds’ Advertising and Client Relations Manager) and Saffia Widdershins set out to explore this new world.
The demos at the moment offer a range of locations – some business based, and some more relaxed to encourage social interaction. We ended up exploring two of the latter on our first visit – the Roman Baths and the Castle – and the pictures that accompany this article come from there (and were screenshots taken by Aisling).
The quality of the graphics was good – and particularly impressive was the use of light and shade, which included shadows that actually moved with avatars, giving a degree of verisimilitude greater than Second Life! The avatars were chosen from a narrow range and do not as yet seem customisable – they are clearly not yet as well developed as the Second Life avatars, but were perfectly adequate.
More importantly, the plug-in was easy to download. Aisling had hers up and running straight away; Saffia hit a snag – but the instructions had anticipated this and explained how to correct it (she just needed to download the latest graphics drivers). After that, she was able to meet up with Aisling, travel between location, and share typed information. The learning curve was not steep for anyone who uses Second Life, and the instructions were simply delivered and easy to follow.
In other words, although clearly in its early days, this is a fully functioning and easily usable system that delivers very good results via the web – specifically Internet Explorer. This seems a very promising project, and we’ll be watching its growth and development with considerable interest.
Prim Perfect 
If you do nothing else, it is worth spending a few moments today, trying the variety of demo worlds we have on offer. The list is growing all the time, even existing worlds are being amended.
The pictures you see do not give the impression that the environment is created with a very high percentage of Meshes (sculpties for you SLers), that are native to this particular platform we are hosting within our process. This gives a very realistic look and ‘feel’ to the environments, whereby trees and plants can have actual petals, leaves and branches in high detail and colour.
The current range of Avatars are our ‘Jillies’ (equal to SL’s Ruth), we will be offering a custom service and a greater basic range for business soon. For those that want more social avatars, watchout for the release of the Ethos-Grids next year.
We will be adding the ability to transport objects to and from OpenSim platforms, as well as many other platforms in the near future. Our goal is to free the Avatar/User from platforms, and allow them to traverse the 3D web.
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