Vendor announcements may help lower the technological barriers

By Sam Driver and Erica Driver.

The year 2009 has been marked by rapid-fire advancements in the immersive software market. Every time we attend a meeting or briefing in the latest release of one of the products we cover, we see noticeable changes. These improvements are important because many of the barriers to adoption we identified in our recent report, “Crossing the Chasm, One Implementation at a Time,” are technology-related.

Building on the trend we’ve been witnessing all year, in the second half of September alone, vendors made announcements — some timed to coincide with the 3DTLC conference — about improvements in:

• System integration. ProtonMedia announced a new add-on to ProtoSphere, called SharePoint Media Carousel, which enables collaborative viewing and editing of documents that reside within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Forterra Systems’ OLIVE 2.3 supports a variety of additional enterprise authentication mechanisms beyond those it supported before, provides telephony integration, and integrates out of the box with the Drupal Web content management (WCM) system. It provides APIs for additional WCM systems and for artificial intelligence (AI) system that can be used to create clerks, doctors, officers, customers, or other characters for use in immersive learning environments.
• Scalability and performance. Scalability and performance play a very important role in the user experience. Altadyn 3DXplorer 5.0 includes a wider range of avatar options than previous releases. The new avatars take up fewer system resources so more avatars can fit into a single environment. Teleplace (formerly Qwaq) announced Teleplace 3.0, which now has dynamic load balancing and cluster expansion.
• Features that make the software easier to use. Teleplace 3.0 provides tools to make the job of meeting leaders easier, like gathering participants automatically, moderating Q&A, and conducting visual polling. Teleplace 3.0 also supports live streaming of activities taking place in the immersive environment out to desktop media players. Forterra OLIVE 2.3 has a new custom content installer for easier download and installation by end users. It also has improved support for streaming media and 2D content display (e.g., documents and Web pages) within the environment.

Pragmatic technology buyers will require immersive software to expose and document APIs and provide out-of-box interfaces to enterprise apps, information worker tools, and back-end systems. Pragmatic end users will demand that applications perform as expected and are easy to use, even for the first time. They will shy away from applications that cause frustration. Given these realities, these announcements coming out of the vendor community indicate steady movement in the right direction.

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