IBM and Sun Launch Intranet Metaverses

wjamesau writes "Sun and IBM have launched intranet metaverses designed for business and built to work behind their corporate firewalls, so their worldwide employees can use them to collaborate together. Most interesting to game developers, IBM (which also runs a private, no public access Second Life island as a development lab) created their intranet world from the 3D Torque engine from Garage Games. Will the metaverse actually be thousands of gated community metaverses?"

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is a metaverse?

Re:Interesting.

[mbook]

It's been a while since I read Snow Crash, but I think Hiro Protagonist spent most of his time in two "gated communities" -- the Black Sun (a private club) and Rife's HQ (heavy security to keep out the uninvited). Not much time spent in public spaces. Seems like you'd want both public and private spaces, just like in Real Life.

As Intel wipes the sweat off its collective brow..

[mattr]

Finally, a reason to keep buying more powerful processors. Even if much is offloaded to the graphics board, all the intermeshed video, real time gesture and what the heck else will all be good for the bottom line if a metaverse is required for business. They've been salivating about this for years. No more having to fund music startups and whoever else comes up with a product that requires serious processing (had a friend who got investment from them for such a purpose).

Torque sounds neat but extremely expensive. Just how much did IBM spend on liscensing it and how much to upgrade hardware to support it? And is it that good? They could also have invested in becoming the top sponsor of croquet too, though it seems to require significant resources. (in terms of max. people in a room, and also how well it works on different pcs - I've had it crash mainly due to a gl bug I think or fail to run on a number of machines).

Well

[suv4x4]

Now we now Sun has totally lost it.

But wait, no, if they can make all our development and design tools run INSIDE their 3D world, on virtual computers, and make their workers use the virtual computers to work, then we know they lost it.

Seeing from what we have here though, I wouldn't be surprised if they're already working on it.

Re:It is

[Profane MuthaFucka]

If you've ever played Second Life, then you know that it's really a fancy chat room. IBM, and lots of other companies, run on Sametime (IBM's Lotus branded chat program, works pretty much like AIM or any other chat program).

I'm not surprised that there's a new chat-room product built like Second Life. I just wonder if it meets the business requirements as well as or better than the chat program we already use.