Virtual World Website

**D* G* <g*@gmail.com>**

I’m really pleased to be able to tell you I’ve just launched what I believe
to be the first fully interactive gardening 3-d website.  A virtual world,
akin to the movie Avatar, it allows visitors to converse in real time, to
walk through a “real” environment, to share pdfs, powerpoint presentations,
slide shows, video and even browse the Net and make telephone calls-  all
from within the world/website.

Right now, I’m running a basic design and meeting area setup where folks can
meet and chat.   I’m currently in the process of setting up a design team to
be able to translate landscape drawings into 3-d formats so visitors will be
able to walk through garden rooms and view the appropriate garden plants for
that landscape.  Instead of “seeing” a drawing, visitors will  be able to
walk through the garden and examine it from all angles.

Similarly, I’ll be having the designers do photo-realistic 3-d
representations of real plants - that new Echinacea, the new Heuchera, that
rose, container design,  or whatever, so visitors can examine the plant and
how it grows (because we can tag individual objects with pop-up websites or
info links if people click on a plant).  There are a great many plans for
the plant side of things as well as the design side.

Plans are developing to run a seminar series there - online conferences and
perhaps even trade shows.   The servers have been set up to scale so while
the existing world handles a small number of people, we can plug in an
almost infinite number of servers to handle up to hundreds of people at the
same time.  (Don’t ask me the tech side of how they mirror and operate this
- I just know they can) :-)

I’m fortunate to have worked with the Sun development team directly for this
project and these folks are maintaining the technical backend.  And I’ve
been speaking to the city industrial development folks about setting up a
design team from local art and technical colleges to provide the 3-d realism
we’re looking for.

For the next month or so I’m running user trials and chatting with folks on
the site to explore how they might use it or see the problems involved in
making it a useful way to attract the younger graphical-interface user
demographic.

If you’re curious at all about it - want to see it - or want to chat about
it - drop me a note offlist and we can set up a meeting (there naturally)
and I can go over some of the tech needs and bells and whistles on the
site.  I’m delighted to share and give you a peek at it before I launch it
to the general public.

For the curious:  The site runs on java language programming that runs
equally well on Windows, Mac and LInux systems.   It does require a decent
gaming video card so if you can play modern games, you can use this system.
Older non-gaming (cheap) computers will not have the processing speed to
handle this graphic interface.  For the really technical - NVidia cards seem
to work the best.  You’ll require a headset to separate the mic and speaker
systems or the rest of world participants wind up with terrible echo
problems.  And you’ll require a high-speed connection; I tend to hardwire my
system  when I’m in-world instead of wireless to avoid any sound skipping
issues.  I run a 2-year old MacBook Pro and it works fine.

If you're at all curious about this kind of 3-d website or how you might use
it, do drop me a note.  I know a group of my readers (particularly the
younger ones) are going to be all over this.

Doug

-- 
Doug Green
Editor-in-Chief,
SGF Publishing
http://www.simplegiftsfarm.com
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