Cube3 offers corporate 3D spaces with 3DXplorer

OfficePodz, is the name of this new “virtual office system” for corporate spaces, designed and architectured by Larry Rosenthal, Cube3‘s leader.

C3 OfficePodz is composed of a group of customizable 3D spaces that offer the most common activities and features that corporate users have requested for using virtual worlds online. The  initial offer includes a basic showroom/ conference room/ seminar modular space, a more specialized video theater modular space, and an auditorium/stadium outside space for larger group meetings and seminars, all designed and hosted with 3DXplorer.

“Many Virtual Spaces or Worlds online are either very expensive projects in closed platform low corporate usage worlds, or visually designed as “2D cartoon-like games” and are not appropriate for corporate commercial usage in a real business environment.” stated Cube3‘s Larry Rosenthal. “The C3 OfficePodz are designed specifically in a clean professional modern style that once customized with graphics and client specific content, can provide the easiest to access, greatest reach solution, to virtual worlds for business website’s online.”

To read Cube3 full press release, click here.

Announcing the 3DXplorer users’ group

We are  excited to announce the creation of a Users’ Group for 3DXplorer, on LinkedIn.

This group, open to all registered 3DXplorer users, is a forum for sharing your experiences with 3DXplorer, asking technical questions from more experienced users, and receiving news and information from Altadyn and 3DXplorer partners.

Moreover, by signing up for this users’ group you can stay informed of meetings and events.

Join us today and share your experience: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1870426

We hope you will get involved!

Altadyn presented 3DXplorer at OCTANe’s OC Innovation Showcase

Given our global market, we present more often virtually, and participate to more focused events in real. But yesterday we had the pleasure to present 3DXplorer to our “neighbourhood” and partcipated to the annual Innovation Showcase organized by OCTANE in Irvine, covering technology oriented visitors in Orange County, CA.

The one day event, a first of its kind, was held at the Hyatt Regency Irvine, and showcased 75 of the regions most innovative companies as we displayed our hottest products and technologies. It attracted several hundreds of visitors.

3DXplorer presentations, were particularly popular. 3DXplorer/Online Meeting was often considered by visitors as a more interactive and more engaging web conferencing solution, compared to traditional tools, thanks to immersion, 3D and interactions.

Meet-in-3D was also noticed by many visitors, who see it as an excellent tool to increase sales leads from their website, by adding live interaction and transforming the anonymous visitors to pre-qualified leads.

Looking forward to continued interaction online with our visitors.

Check out 3DXplorer’s new user documentation.

Good news! Two new manuals are now available for all 3DXplorer Studio users, under “Help”:

Users’ Manual: It provides task oriented functional help to users in order to execute tasks within 3DXplroer Studio, such as : “How to create an Online Meeting space.” Or “How to animate objects”. Some of these helps were available until now through

blog articles; several new tasks have been added and the whole list is now available under help.

Reference Manual: It provides help for each specifi feature and menu button to help users understand their use case.

Both sections include screen captures and examples helping with an even faster learning curve for 3DXplorer Studio.

To open these HTML manuals, enter your online 3DXplorer account and find the HELP in the menu.

We welcome your feedback on this new set of manuals.

3D in a browser, now Google’s turn again.

After Khronos group’s initiative that we commented recently, and after premature retirement of Lively (browser-based, but requiring a client installation), here’s a new initiative from Google towards “web 3D for all”, that we are glad to notice. But let’s see what is it all about:

What is O3D ?
It’s an open source API which enables creating 3D web applications using JavaScript, which works with a plug-in the user has to install on top of the browser.
Similar to Canvas 3D JS Library from Mozilla, and many other plug-in-requiring web 3D platforms (Active-X based or client based), O3D is shader-oriented, which means that experimented 3D developers will be able to achieve advanced rendering effects.

Is this a new web 3D platform ? No it’s not a platform at the same level as 3DXplorer, as it’s not offering the full 3D engine, although offering an excellent rendering engine. Moreover, there are no avatars, no multi-user session, nor chat or even a synchronous networking environment.

Which companies or technologies is this announcement aiming at:
Not only Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight are concerned by this initiative, but even upper layer development  platforms requiring plug-ins are clearly aimed at, including all 3D web platforms with client installations and active-X, especially those targeting developers (Unity, 3Dvia,…)

What are other pros and cons of O3D:
Pros:
•    A great rendering engine.
•    Another initiative supporting the trend towards browser-based web3D
Cons:
•    Still requires a plug-in to be installed for the player. The market will most likely refuse it unless for very motivated users (gamers?)
•    Can’t hide the Javascript code. Most programmers  would like to protect their programs Javascript and publish their code for free.

Google’s intention is a belief that web3D is going to be browser-based, open and thin. Google actually recognizes that it would be even great without a plug-in, hoping that the plug-in will be adopted (3DXplorer is already plug-in-less). In all cases, O3D is only going to accelerate the emergence of the web 3D applications for all computers. Looking forward to seeing it in action.

Altadyn presented 3DXplorer in Washington D.C.

We were pleased to present 3DXplorer, to federal government managers and other visitors during the Federal Consortium for Virtual World (FCVW) annual event, at the National Defense University in Washington D.C., last week.

The FCVW, also a 3DXplorer client, is using both the Meet-in-3D application (note the navigation bar on the home page), and the Online Meeting application for webinars.

On Wednesday April 22, two dedicated presentation sessions, each during one hour, were the occasion to present 3DXplorer platform, the authoring studio, the avatar configurator, as well as the flagship applications of Online Meeting and Meet-in-3D to the participants who were also able to watch the creation of a new space in minutes and to ask questions in regards with 3DXplorer unique features, with a lot of interest and enthusiasm.

On Thursday and Friday, participants could meet company’s CEO, Darius Lahoutifard, and discuss projects and ask questions. In the meantime several conferences and panel discussions were held in different halls at NDU and the main one was streamed live using 7 different virtual worlds platforms, simultaneously. 3DXplorer was the most accessible and the only one which was not requiring neither installation nor registration. Hundreds of visitors, could thus watch the conference program, live, without having to travel to D.C.

The event was a particularly well organized one, with many valuable presentations and show cases of use of virtual worlds within the US government & defense segment, positioning the FCVW as the leading group in this space.