VIRTUAL EDGE SUMMIT LIVE 3D immersive technology stuns delegates

13/01/2011 by Ian Whiteling, Joint Editor in Chief Print

Attendees at one of the seminars at this year’s Virtual Edge Summit in Las Vegas were amazed at the 3D technology that’s now on the market for virtual meetings and events.

Comments such as: “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” were uttered during the demonstration by David Gardner, chief executive of VenueGen – and this was despite a technology malfunction that meant it had to be cut short.

What delegates saw were 3D virtual meetings populated by avatars, but more life like than people are used to seeing in environments such as Second Life. What’s more, the avatars had the faces of the people they were representing, with the 3D immersive technology creating a real feeling of the presence of others in the meeting.

What was clear to Gardner’s audience was how much more engaging an environment VenueGen’s 3D event was compared to the two dimensional versions that are becoming increasingly widespread. And it is this increased level of engagement that Gardner believes makes meetings held in a 3D environment much more effective.

“Analysts Gartner and Forrester both predicted the rise and widespread adoption of Web3D by 2010,” said Gardner. “This was the hype cycle, and what people found was that the technology was difficult to build, couldn’t negotiate firewalls easily or be downloaded quickly enough. Plus it was complex to use and expensive. But now we’ve hit the five-year point, I believe all these issues have been resolved.

“But one key issue remains – we have failed to make the case for how important engagement is to online meetings. It’s very hard to measure, but last year $350 billion dollars was lost through disengaged staff, according to research.

“Why would people spend so much on Telepresence, when WebEx was so cheap? Because it is engaging and 2D screen sharing is not.”

So what about the cost of 3D immersive meetings technology? Well Gardner was keen to point out that is has become very affordable.”

“Web3D can be installed in under a minute, learned in 30 seconds and is cheaper that WebEx,” he said.

So after a five-year wait, perhaps Gardner may well see his vision for the future of corporate meetings come to fruition in 2011.

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