Collaborate Anywhere: Getting Down to Business

By Wilson Korol | 1 Jun 2011

Those who read this blog regular know well my interest and passion for Avaya web.alive. The virtual world is a significant upgrade in collaboration, makes work more fun and productive. A virtual world is also many orders of magnitude more resource and energy efficient. Today, I am turning the blog over to a guest author, Joe Rigby, marketing director at MellaniuM Inc. MellaniuM is a virtual worlds design firm specializing in the Avaya Web.alive platform, and today Joe is writing about the work his firm is doing to create dynamic web.alive environments, both from the current world and from past time periods. With these environments, you are able to add a fun and engaging element to your web.alive experience.

A reminder, you can join me in web.alive for Avaya sustainability office hours at demo.avayalive.com every Thursday at 11 am EST.

Getting Down to Business
Joe Rigby, marketing director at MellaniuM Inc

With a feature set designed originally for the enterprise, web.alive is a web browser plug-in that integrates with your 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 your 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 high polygon modeling. These environments can be developed from both existing 3D mesh models compiled from any CAD software or geo-referenced terrain maps using the latest UAV scanning techniques. For example, it is entirely possible to create scaled replicas of long gone masterpieces of the Industrial Revolution or entire archaeological reconstructions or the lost civilizations of ancient Egypt. This customization means you can add a unique spin to your next meeting in web.alive.

Examples of MellaniuM environments include
The Titanic

The Temple of Horus

How does the design take place? Joe writes on his blog,

Now I know that most of you are waiting -- almost in rapture with anticipation -- for the soon-to-be-released timeline for the eventual introduction of the gridwide capability of the importation of meshes into the Second Life and OpenSim architectures. Web.alive is fully functional in this regard and 3D models with millions of polygons in almost any format can be recompiled and imported through the Web.alive editor. How does this impact in any way the potentialities of the Web.alive platform? To put it bluntly it makes all the difference in the virtual world.

At MellaniuM, we have taken their 3D Studio Max OBJ file format aerial scans -- with over 400,000 polygons -- and imported them into Web.alive. The geo-referenced Google Map image was combined with 320 scans of the 3D terrain scanned by the unmanned aerial vehicle utilized by PIX4D. We imported the textured model into Web.alive. As an attempt at proof of concept it was flawless. The entire dimensionally accurate replica of the mine can be visited by anyone on the planet to plan and designate resources or discuss the financial viability. The next step is to further extend the capability and develop higher resolution virtual replicas of everything and anything that can be commercially valuable.