MELLANIUM AND LEARNING SITES SIGN EVALUATION LICENCE AGREEMENT

400 B.C. Greek Farmhouse from Learning Sites rendered from CAD software

Joint PR statement
We are pleased to announce that a license agreement has been reached between Learning Sites (http://www.learningsites.com/) and MellaniuM (http://www.mellanium.co.uk/) with the purpose of importing one of Learning Sites virtual worlds into the web.alive/Unreal platform for eventual immersive global collaborations. The first Learning Sites virtual world to make the transition will be the Vari House (a 4th c. BCE Hellenistic beekeeper's house in Attica,Greece).

The Vari House was excavated in the 1960s, and the 3D computer models developed by Learning Sites became a pioneering virtual world for inter

active education in the late-1990s. It seemed appropriate that this well-known package become the first test case of the new partnership. Learning Sites has been an international leader in innovative digitally reconstructed ancient worlds for interactive education, research, museum display, broadcast, tourism, and publication.

With a feature set designed originally for the enterprise, web.alive is a web browser plug-in that integrates with an existing network, security, and business applications to enhance communications, collaboration, and employee or consumer engagement. In this way, web.alive minimizes operational overhead, dramatically increases accessibility to users, and delivers face-to-face interaction at the low cost of Web collaboration. Avaya web.alive represents the future of communications and offers the best of publicly and privately accessible immersive Web

conferencing.
MellaniuM has leveraged this platform to produce unique and innovative environments scaled to up to 10 km. square containing very high-polygon models. These environments can be developed either from existing 3D mesh models compiled from 3D modeling packages or from geo-referenced terrain maps using the latest UAV scanning techniques. For example, it is entirely possible to create accurately scaled simulations of long-gone masterpieces of the Industrial Revolution or entire archaeological sites, as we hope this partnership will demonstrate.

Vari Farmhouse courtyard imported in web.alive

Keep watching our two Websites for updates about and invitations for joining in the Vari web.alive experience.

EXPERIENCE VIRTUAL SUSHI AT KOI, HAMILTON

In the upscale restaurant area of Hess Village in Hamilton, Ontario one can experience fine dining at the KOI/SIZZLE bar. The cobblestoned street and the well maintained elegant Victorian environs are a breath of fresh air in this otherwise rather jaded city of South-Western Ontario. It's a magnet for the young crowd at night and during the day the local debonaire set of lawyers and professionals can be often seen sporting their various european automobile extravangances. Hollywood movies are shot in the pristinely manicured local pedestrian alleyways and byways, the local Scottish Rite Church is a gothic, awe-inspiring site indeed.

But, I digress, the most important development in the ongoing growth of Mellanium comprises the virtual reproduction of this bar and restaurant in the very finest of details into a 24/7 available web.alive environment. MellaniuM is continuing to expand its technique and this showcase illustrates this ever-improving capability. The bar contains the exact duplicates of the furnishings and overall liquor bar accoutrements present in the real bar.

The menus and wine lists are reproduced with exactness that is breathtaking. The cutlery, soya pots and condiments are likewise rendered to perfection.

I invite you to experience the first virtual SUSHI bar, come and meet the bar manager, hob nob with the owners and get yourself a discount on the real thing. Come on in and enjoy a free drink at the real bar, click here to enter.

SOFTLY, SOFTLY, CATCHEE MONKEY

It has to be admitted that AVAYA's web.alive has not been launched with a fanfare of brass or a modern rendition of Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance". In fact quite the opposite in some cases. I am sure there have been several instances where seriously enthusiastic individuals have been disillusioned by the inability to work an arrangement with AVAYA .

Following another completely different train of thought I had a SKYPE conversation with John Jainschigg (Director of Ziff Davis Enterprise's Internet and Community Laboratory) a few weeks ago where he made some simple logical arguments that the AVAYA business model and the web.alive platform may be somewhat incompatible.

"So these guys(AVAYA) are actually experts in negotiating semi-sustainable positions within locked markets while bucking huge technology trends at some level.

It clearly doesn't fit into the core pattern of "purpose-dedicated high cost hardware"on which Avaya has built their sustaining position. i.e., Avaya's PBXs are software, too. But they've built a long-term mystique around PBXs that says ...

1) This is 'mission critical' - don't chance using off-brand junk.

2) This is 'reputational' - your company's phone image is critical to success.

3) Your users are too stupid to use Skype

4) Phone technology is the worst-case fusion of "tricky" and "boring" -- there are no triumphs here for 20-year-old hackers. This is about dialtone, dialtone, dialtone (and value-added features). Let the kids fool with the web.

Whereas web.alive is clearly edgy, clearly software, and doesn't shout 'incredible collaboration value!' except to a small minority of thinkers.

The original concept for 'PC based phone systems' was very much driven by the notion of 'apps, apps, apps.' That is, there was general recognition that a PC-based PBX from someone like Avaya constituted a platform, and that developers might create new stuff for that platform.

This has never happened. The 'apps' idea was right-on, but went to mobile, where it's exploding"

His basic thesis does make one ponder. However software collaborative solutions will develop and evolve and hardware options are being supplanted whether AVAYA likes it or not.Two weeks after John said this SKYPE did a face plant and has left lots of business owners seriously disappointed. So AVAYA's web.alive has to be robust, bug-free and ready for serious endeavour from a business perspective. There is no room for performance hyperbole if the US government is considering this platform for a virtual communications and collaboration platform.

The latest announcement from Nic Sauriol on the web.alive development team entails the roll-out of version 3.0 (by mid 2011) which will be compatible with MAC OS and have simple push button features to allow for a complete record of any meetings in-world.

So I think we must assume that if web.alive is to be taken seriously the future versions of this platform have to be commercially fit-for-purpose. Launching prematurely or with extravagant claims is obviously not on the cards and so it does seem that AVAYA are approaching this market with quiet confidence and the motto "SOFTLY, SOFTLY, CATCHEE MONKEY" does seem to apply .

Give the present demo area a try ( every time I visit it is a hive of activity with AVAYA employees debating the administrative rights demands and piling into a private room with the SIP phone flashing for another closed door session) at http://demo.avayalive.com. This AVAYA demo environment allows anyone entry to booths and office settings which can be configured to receive inworld phone calls. Recently word of mouth is generating an increasingly larger volume of visits and official presentations. Numerous banks, universities and collaboration consultancies from around the world have been showing intense interest. Indeed also, Robert Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet) and who now leads innovation initiatives at the University of Texas at Austin Cockrell School of Engineering was shown around and was suitably impressed.

In the mean time MellaniuM is expanding the range of possibilities by utilizing the development site at www.wagenesis.org to produce environments with Roman monuments which can be explored with jet packs with realistic physics (take a trip it's quite a challenge) When you go in world you will see rotating jet packs, run up to them and depress the space bar to launch off the ground (use W-S-A-D to control direction).

Our capability to introduce these animated scripts and shader effects illustrate the potential of web.alive to generate much more immersive experiences in the near future.

PTAKE A RIDE ON A PTERANODON

YAMAHA DIRT BIKE (HD 3D RENDERING)

MellaniuM is now offering tours of several environments illustrating the range of possibilities using high definition models in the new web.alive 2.5. Dimensionally accurate scale reproductions can be imported into the web.alive for astonishing engineering prototyping. Dinosaur exhibits and natural history museums are ready for your perusal on request.

Riding high above a dinosaur exhibit

3D Natural History

Web.alive, I am sure you all know by now, is one click of a URL and you are inworld engaging with the assets and VOIP just works. We can now bring you a kaleidoscope of instances with the engineered furnace for refining copper (an old one but one of the best), apartments and aviaries

Anode Refining Furnace

Contact us over SKYPE at joe133952 for a tour of any of these environments

IEEE STANDARDS WORKING GROUP MEETING IN MELLANIUM OFFICES

Andrew Hughes, President of Designing Digitally, kindly arranged to have a meeting of the IEEE STANDARDS Working Group in the web.alive office of MellaniuM at 4pm. EST on Friday 24th Sept. Tom Starai, Information Management Coordinator at IEEE, has co-ordinated this working group. Since its inception it has attracted a spectrum of individuals with both the experience and passion to develop the terms of reference and capability to lay the foundations of accepted standards for virtual environments.

The meeting was well attended with twelve participants and questions were posited about content development, maximum possible concurrency and instance size capability. Arn Hyndman, Gino Brancatelli and Chris Hardy from AVAYA attended and were more than happy to answer all the questions from the Working Group members.

1. With respect to how the objects are created in WA (Web.alive). Some are created directly in the WA editor (an enhanced UNREALED 3.0) and some are imported as static meshes from commercial tools like MAX, Maya, Blender, Lightwave, etc. CAD drawings have been imported to create Architectural and Engineering objects. As far as the learning curve of UNREAL ED; most universities use the editor for courses in gaming and architecture and there exists a huge tutorial data base UDN web site.
2. The issue of concurrency was debated and it is a simple matter of server limitation. However >200 people have been accommodated in one instance. In essence thousands can be online with sufficient server availability.
3. Instances can be as large as 10km.x10km.

(Hat tip to Andrew Hughes for the screenshot)

WEB.ALIVE 2.5 LAUNCHES

AVAYA really is serious about immersive collaboration using the web.alive platform. Not only has web.alive launched commercially with a 2.5 version with improved HD spatial audio but new features such as in world phone communication make for a true enterprise ready solution.

Check out the new AVAYA Web.Alive demonstration room.

The virtual telephony device with the green lights on the table connects directly to the SIP network ( yes, you can phone out of this virtual office )

In addition a developer community website at www.wagenesis.org provides both the opportunity to learn about making your own web.alive environment and the ability to post them up on a server for all to explore and comment. We have already started to import some developmental environments containing state of the art assets such as this Mini with shaders to apply a polish on the paintwork. I have to admit with a little modification it will be soon possible to jump in the Mini and drive it around .

Please go and check out the "Tree of Life" and watch the leaves move in the "Flower of Life" Dome. At the WAGENESIS developers environment site.

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS WEB.ALIVE

Web.alive has been treated in some ways like a red headed stepson although its pedigree is impeccable being based on the mighty UNREAL 2.5 engine a proven, robust and well-encrypted platform. NORTEL embedded this platform in the web browser and simultaneously added the Diamondware spatial audio. It could not be easier to use and the learning curve is almost negligable. Furthermore the Special Communications Research Branch of the US government tried out the MellaniuM Dome during a Gronstedt meeting and pondered as they peered dumbfounded at a dinosaur model with over 350,000 polygons. We could hear them muttering feverishly over their analysis that there was so little bandwidth that one could easily have hundreds of people in this environment.
However the stable from which it sprung has no weight in the present VW community. A community I might add, for good or ill , that has been crystallizing around the Second Life nucleus for several years.

For most of 2009 our efforts to stimulate interest in web.alive environments containing MellaniuM content were futile. Eminently competent consultants we approached stated that NORTEL was now bankrupt and web.alive would founder with it. When AVAYA bought the Business Unit of NORTEL that contained web.alive we were told that AVAYA will excise web.alive as an abomination and absorb NORTEL ignominiously into the overall larger telecom behemoth that it will now become. So on the whole we had been instructed to understand by some very competent and extremely knowedgable individuals that our efforts have been in vain and that "THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS WEB.ALIVE.


Early in the development of MellaniuM we had idealistic notions of acedemia waiting in the wings to recognize the value of high polygon modelling for realistic architectural renderings of archaeological significance. We were blogged about by Shawn Graham in his Electric Archaeology blog "AutoCad into UNREAL" who even mentioned the importance of experiencing a space as imagined by Diane Favro and Michael Lynch. (Strangely enough a comment was inserted by Al Meyers of Rome Reborn rights fame saying he would love to talk to us) Within a few weeks we experienced the unalloyed joy and privilege of receiving a model of the Arch of Titus from UCLA which we rapidly rendered into UNREAL. Within weeks we had been sent by the Kings' Visualisation Lab the entire "Theatre of Pompey" a massive rendering in minute detail in a 3D Studio Max file. We enthusiastically prepared a short paper for VSMM 2008 to collaborate with Maurizio Forte and his extremely competent cohorts to illustrate our realistic virtual world developments.


The resulting actions from all these efforts was at best a resounding silence and at worst a threat lawyers would be unleashed to contact us if we breathed a word about the work we had produced.

Ironically enough we were in contact about the same time with Prof. Bob Stone of Birmingham University, a founder and former president of the VSMM, and asked him if he was attending that year. He professed somewhat cryptically that he would likely never venture to another VSMM conference but that he would be very interested in how we were received at the conference. Bob has been a touchstone for us in the realm of virtual worlds especially when we informed him of the fact that we had been nominated for an award at the LAVAL VIRTUEL 2010. He congratulated us profusely and exclaimed laconically that he too had been nominated and actually had won awards there but they had fallen apart before he arrived back home

When Billy discovers a dragon in his bedroom, and tells his mother, his mother insists there's no such thing as a dragon—even when the dragon appears on the kitchen table, and eats all Billy's pancakes but one, grows so big that Billy's mother has to go through windows to get to other parts of the house, and even runs after a bakery truck with the house on its back.

Strangely enough MellaniuM were afforded more than just faint praise by some influential bloggers namely Dusan Writer when he stated in a blog post "Second Life and the 3D Pipeline"

"Meanwhile, elsewhere on the game platforms, MellaniuM has created a bridge from Autocad to the Unreal engine that is beyond stunning – and provides a low-cost, flexible platform for visualization. Being able to create highly detailed rendered models and bring them seamlessly into a virtual platform is significant, and folks should be rejoicing from the mountaintops, at least among the architecture, landscape, design set…or anyone who wants to properly provide a walk through of something that has detail and looks REAL."

One can never say that Dusan minces his words, however several months later he, admittedly, made a throwaway comment by saying there are "a few ideas poking around with Web.Alive, maybe, which is a product that should, well, die a quick death in my opinion – I mean, haven’t we moved past Unreal?"

Billy went downstairs to tell his mother. "There's no such thing as a dragon!" said Billy's mother. And she said it like she meant it.

One has to admit that change is in the air. I recently was pleasantly surprised to stumble across a podcast of the Gronstedt group "Virtual Worlds in the Enterprise: 2010, The Year Ahead" with Sam Driver of ThinkBalm, Jennifer Belissent of Forrester Research, and Doug Thompson (SL: Dusan Writer) of Remedy Communications. January 14, 2010 where Sam Driver expresses some remarkable insight into the potential of web.alive if AVAYA ever considers utilizing a redefined unified communications strategy. With its behemoth global reach and enterprise network capabilities what can they not achieve with the vision to employ web.alive as a holistic collaborative platform?

And last but not least how will the USDA decision eventually pan out in the next three years. It is somewhat sobering to realize that the majority of the requirements specified in the RFP are available now on the the web.alive platform they do not indeed require a three year contract period to develop and implement.

And at the FCVW Erica Driver of Thinkbalm stated with no compunction to all present that everyone should check out all the virtual world platforms available and see which fits the clients need,

and I must give Erica Driver the last say since she declared recently in a TWEET

"Thought of the day: Avaya has a great opportunity to change the face of unified communications with its web.alive immersive technology because they are already a unified communications provider, and also have immersive tech in their portfolio. "