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Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Alternatives to Second Life

Here is a list of alternatives to Second Life.

Forterra Systems Inc.

The company offers private, secure virtual worlds with tailored solutions based on industry and customer specific needs. The solutions are designed by Forterra to meet enterprise IT security and privacy needs. The flagship product of Forterra is OLIVE™ (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment). OLIVE is an open, distributed client-server platform for building private virtual worlds. The architecture scales from single user applications up to thousands of concurrent users. The SDK provides an API, licensable 3D content, 3rd party system integrations, and tools to create and edit 3D content and scenarios.

Icarus Studios

The company offers tools and products for createing Massively Multiplayer Oline environments and virtual worlds. The flagship Icarus Platform is actually a suite of products that feature a back end designed to drive a wide variety of front end experiences. The platform is built according to open standards, specifically to be extensible and easily integrated with partner systems. This includes compatibility with industry standard tools such as 3ds Max, Collada, and other 3D applications.

Teleplace. (formerly known as Qwaq)

The company offers private, secure virtual workspace and meeting application. Teleplace provides an environment for distributed teams to communicate and collaborate on multiple applications and documents in real time. Teleplace’s vPresence™ technology securely combines VOIP, chat, and video with a virtual application command center, and can be deployed either behind the firewall or in the cloud. Teleplace enables an organization to create a virtual operations center in which sensitive and confidential information is developed, discussed, and used to make decisions and solve problems, create a space to manage projects, facilitate meetings, conduct corporate training or establish a virtual office.

Unisfair

The company offers “virtual events” and “virtual environments” for marketing, recruiting and augmenting physical conferences. The flagship product is the virtual event experience. The company offers a number of tools such as microsites—a customizable branded web site tied to the event, virtual venues—a main hall, conference hall, exhibition hall and a resource center, and attendee tools—briefcase to store information, personal profile, and search capabailities.

Virtual Heroes

The company offers creates collaborative interactive learning solutions for Federal Systems, Healthcare and Corporate Training markets. The applications offered facilitate highly interactive, self-paced learning and instructor-led, distributed team training. The flagship product is the Virtual Heroes Advanced Learning Technology (A.L.T.) platform. Major components of this platform include the Unreal® Engine 3 by Epic Games and Dynamic Virtual Human Technology (DVHT) created by Virtual Heroes. DVHT combines electronic computer game technology with a digital human physiology engine, digital pharmacokinetic drug models, accurate biomechanical parameters and artificial intelligence subroutines for realistic virtual humans and environment.

ProtonMedia

The company offers a virtual environment along with several social networking tools build right in. The flagship product, ProtoSphere is build from the ground up for learning. It contains SCORM compliant interfaces and the ability to have learners appear in virtual classrooms, buildings, airfields and other environments. One of the hallmarks of the product is its inclusion of a virtual doctor’s office and the seamless incorporation of 2D learning content directly into the virtual world and the ability find individuals with similar interests through the social networking application.

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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Karl,

You should add a company by the name of InXpo (www.inxpo.com) to your list. InXpo provides Virutal Communities and Events to companies. I'd be happy to educate you on InXpo!

Regards,

Lou DePasquale, Client Services VP
ldepasquale@inxpo.com

Karl Kapp said...

Lou,

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Anonymous said...

Hi Karl, I see that the Immersive Education Initiative is launching an Education Grid with Sun's open-source Wonderland virtual-world servers. My understanding is that this is very early in development, but it's the start, in essence, of an open-source alternative to Second Life. Quite interesting...

http://immersiveeducation.org/events/#ED_GRID_WONDERLAND

Anonymous said...

Hello, Karl:

I've been a "lurker", and this post gave me the information I've been looking for, so I'm coming out into the light!

I am a virtual world newbie, and hope to go in world this weekend. It's amazing what educators are creating in world. One Slideshare.com presentation really dangled the carrot in front of me. I wrote about it at:

http://ridgeviewmedia.com/blog/2008/06/librarians-in-second-life-video-of-the-month-200806/

Any words of encouragement for me?

~Jenise.

Karl Kapp said...

Jenise,
First, thanks for the comment very appreciated! For your venture into virtual worlds remember that these are social worlds so if it seems boring that is because activity is one of the keys to effective instruction. More on this later.

Karl

Brett S. said...

I actually never realized there were so many different platforms that could be utilized in place of Second Life. It does make sense that the popularity of Second Life has spawned new companies from its concepts. I look forward to learning about all of these utilities to see which would be best suited for specific training needs.