As SceneCaster is getting ready for its big demo at DEMOfall today and create a consumer brand away from View22, it's worthwhile looking at EON Reality, another major 3D content provider looking to reach out to individuals. EON unveiled EON Visualizer at SIGGRAPH back in August. Shipping in November, Visualizer is targeted at non-technical business users looking to create 3D environments through a drag and drop interface. EON Creator is the free version, allowing users to pull from EON's existing library of "12,000 high-end objects and 30,000 interactive objects" to create their own worlds.
"Versus traditional virtual world companies like Second Life, our focus is more in the area of commercial business," said EON Chairman Dan Lejerskar. "That's what it has been so far. What we're growing toward is to bring those experiences to an online world. We've had 36 million viewers download our viewer, but we see a need for collaboration online. We see a focus on not creating huge virtual worlds, but microworlds with rich visuals and interaction."
Lejerskar adds that the technology will eventually expand to allow for larger, easy-to-use worlds, but right now users are in need of something smaller. In February, though, EON plans to release the tools in "a highly scalable multi-user environment" based on its existing Coliseum technology that will then come out as version 3.0.
"We think there will be a strong wave in the next few years where companies like AOL will want to have these platforms themselves," said Lejerskar. "We don't see ourselves as the social environment, but the tool providers for a much more stable fashion than we see now. We think the existing tools are complicated."
That's a complaint that's become fairly common among virtual worlds developers and tool builders. And it's a problem that many are claiming to fix. Raph Koster calls his Metaplace "Virtual worlds for everyone." Everyscape CEO Jim Schoonmaker is "working on a human experience." Multiverse's Corey Bridges wants to put the medium "put [the medium] in the hands of individuals." And SceneCaster founder Marks Zohar says his mission is to "mainstream the 3D Web."
Obviously, there's a market out there for simple virtual worlds.
EON's plan to tackle that market is to combine a suite of its professional level tools and repackage them in simple-to-use formats. Joining Coliseum and EON Creator are EON Viewer, EON Human, a tool that takes 2D photos and quickly generates a 3D avatar, and the EON Experience Platform, due out next year, to "will encompass microworlds with an unprecedented level of photorealism and interaction." EON Viewer, available now, performs a similar function to the Multiverse World Browser, allowing users to interact with all of the EON-based creations.
"What we think about the avatars is that eventually you should have one you can take across worlds," said Lejersker. "And you have skins that apply to the face and also to some core information about you that you have stored to move around. Visually you may want to embrace various personae, but information-wise you may want to change as well or keep it the same."
It's important to point out that the microworlds Lejersker envisions aren't closed off from each other, just shrunk down with a goal of providing higher visual quality.
"You can't have 200 people in one square," he said. "In AOL you don't normally chat with millions of people, you chat with a few. Compare it to a certain extent with multi-user player environments."
However, the company does have a patent pending for dynamic loading that would allow users to move fluidly from microworld to microworld. In the demo Lejersker walked me through of a Portuguese village, the graphical effects really were quite solid, looking to me like something between photorealism and Oblivion. Other in-door environments looked even better.
From a business perspective, EON's model sounds a bit like SceneCaster's. Lejersker envisions virtual apartments with branded Ikea furniture. However, EON is also continuing to work at designing products and environments for high-end customers, including enterprise solutions for planning spaces--or jets--and licensing EON Human to companies that need highly realistic human faces for their sites. Lejersker points to an eyewear company, a photo company, and one virtual world developer creating a world to work with high-end face models.
EON is also working with the Media Development Agency in Singapore to create a virtual Singapore. The company plans on supporting the development of other white-label worlds as well with a significant portion of revenue coming from licensors.
"I see lots of smaller targeted worlds," said Lejersker. "It's not competitive with Second Life. We're more into the business side. The reason Second Life can't do what we do is not because they aren't excellent with software development, it's limitations of technology, bandwidth, and server capabilities. But those will erode over the next few years."
Comments