Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to tour Nortel's new web.alive platform for virtual interactions. I had been in contact with the project team for some time, and was receiving periodic trickles of feature/functionality of the platform, however had not had a chance to experience it first-hand.
I must say I came away impressed by the level of effort and thought they have put into the platform. The user interaction is more gamelike than most virtual worlds, with easy ASWD/mouse controls for the most part, which addresses an ongoing concern of mine with regards to making virtual world environments as easy for a first-time user as possible. Also, they have integrated the DiamondWare spatial audio code for excellent and clear audio, with great visual notifications if someone is speaking (or standing) off-camera.
We were not able to tour the deeper feature-functionality, such as shared whiteboards and other rich collaboration, however the first impression of the platform is that they did an excellent job. Now, the next step for them will need to be integration with their existing product portfolio, so this doesn't become a technology orphan (cough cough lively cough cough) and suffer from lack of corporate (funding) attention as a result. This integration, paired with target marketing at the most obvious uses of education/learning and enterprise collaboration, will play into Nortel's strengths. All this equals a good new entrant into the virtual worlds arena.
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