Qube Software Announces "Universal Client" for Virtual Worlds; Near London Mirror World

Qube Software announced yesterday that they would position their games and 3D middleware Q software as  a universal client for virtual worlds and online games. Founded by Servan Keondjian and Doug Rabson, who were also behind Direct3D, Qube's software is already in use on game consoles, but launched yesterday online with Near London from Near Global, a mirror world planned to consist of a network of 3D cities filled by businesses, avatars, games, and social networking functions. The goal, eventually, is to use Q as a way to let users access all 3D online environments through one client, aiming to do for Web3D what Netscape did for the original Web.

“There’s been a single missing piece that’s held the internet back from making the decisive shift from 2D to 3D,”  Keondjian, Qube’s CEO, said in a statement, “and that missing piece was a common format and browser that allows users to ‘channel switch’ between 3D worlds online just as they currently surf 2D web pages.”

Of course, other parties will still have to sign on first and the folks from Netscape have their own ideas about how to connect the 3D Web. The point of Q, though, is to work with any 3D app, whether games or virtual worlds, with a flexible plug-in architecture that can talk to multiple servers at a time with any backend.

“Having to install new software for each virtual world or MMOG is a major barrier to would-be users,” Keondjian said.  “I could foresee just this problem when I was building Reality Lab and Direct3D in the 90s, and I set up Qube to crack it.  We believe we have the first real solution in the form of Q.  Surfing between online 3D worlds and experiences built with Q is now possible.”

The first example of the the project is in Near London, or, at least, the first example will be Near London. The movie and pictures look pretty good, though. Near London is set to go public at the end of 2008 with a special seasonal edition and expand over 2009 to include the City of London and West London. The company is now accepting applications for the private beta.

“The way Q works is crucial to Near,” said Near Global founder Alex Wrottesley.  “Near presents cities as virtual gateways – just as a real city street is a gateway to shops and restaurants and other experiences.  So if a retailer wants a visitor to one of Near’s cities to be able to click on their shop door and be transported seamlessly to their own virtual world, with Q that becomes simple.  Near will be able to host the most extensible content ever seen in a virtual world.”

Comments

[len]

Yet Another Universal 3D Browser. That announcement is made how many times a year here? The vendor-side of the market is genuninely uninterested in a universal 3D browser. At some point, this quits being a selling point because it begs the argument. A universal client is, well, universal, meaning the install statistics are well, universal.

So far that's Flash. Que lastima.

[Chuck Baggett]

So it will run Second Life, Active Worlds, Cybertown, Papermint, the Lego world, there.com, Hipihi, Novoking, and so on?

Cool.

;)

[len]

If it runs Cybertown (a big VRML97 app), I'm interested. If it runs X3D, I think I feel a tingle running up my leg.

A language agnostic viewer really will be a sea change if it can get the distribution footprint. Show it running the ISO standard languages and I know some people who will quit curmudgeoning. ;-)

[Jonathan Kent]

Let me give you some background.
Servan and Doug wrote what was then known as Reality Lab back in the early 90s and when Mcrosoft bought their company went to work for them to turn it into Direct3D.
While working on the whole Direct3D project they became aware of the limitations of 3D engines. After leaving Microsoft in 1997 they set out to write a 3D system that would be developer orientated; in other words a system that was made to be easily configured to do pretty much anything. This is quite diferent from an engine such as Unreal's which has been honed for a particular game project and which carries that legacy with it. UE3 offers excellent tools for anyone wanting to make a FPS style video game. Beyond that it's more problematic because it's not really been built to facilitate easy customisation.
Q works on all the major consoles including the PS2 (it's very lean) PC, OSX and Linux. It's genre agnostic. It's been used to build Near, a virtual world. It's designed so that it talks to pretty much anything.
Ten years of work has gone into building something designed to be an industry standard - to a full range of 3D apps what flash is to more modest appliations. Qube is very open to anyone who is serious about a 3D project evaluating Q. Just get in touch via info@qubesoft.com Ultimately the only way to convince people that Q does what it claims to do is to let them check it out for themselves. We're confident it does what it says it does, please feel free to make up your own minds.

[James C]

shows how hard this geography/location stuff is in that this announcement was a year ago and in effect has just been repeated one year on - a whole year of slippage in a year and I bet its not for want of trying. Universality is difficult, capturing the right data to create Near London is hard too, though there are existing sources ;-)