3pointD.com

VRCO Inc. is a company that specializes in creating interactive 3D visual representations of various kinds. “VRCO’s business is immersive environments and we wish to enable as many applications as possible,” reads its Web site. A lot of its products seem to be middleware apps that allow other apps to communicate in 3D, or which translate between “flat” data into 3D representations. Now, Ogle Earth has posted a comment from VRCO senior software engineer Todd Yocum, in which Yocum describes his company as being “probably the closest there is to having GE in a Metaverse at the moment.”

Yocum is referring to a VRCO app called Conduit, which can intercept OpenGL calls from a desktop app and redistribute them to a PC cluster displaying an immersive environment. And by Metaverse, he means the full-immersion, VR-goggle kind:

Conduit . . . can take a normal OpenGL app and allow it to be rendered in 3D stereo in an immersive display. This is not your normal desktop stereo, this is wall-sized display, using head tracking to give the correct perspective based on the viewer’s head. As an added bonus, you can also use Conduit to navigate within a 3D view.

(Conduit was apparently demo’d at the recent VR2006 conference, but there doesn’t seem to be a video to link to yet.)

This sounds like a cool virtual-reality version of the metaverse, but what’s more intriguing to me is the interoperability implied by the concept. I’m not quite sure that headset-enabled VR environments are the wave of the future. I’d put more money on flat-screen 3D environments (Google Earth, Second Life, etc.), and the ways in which they can be made to work with each other. Something like Conduit, or some part of its technology, could be a nice piece of that puzzle, acting almost like an OpenGL protocol between two 3D apps that wouldn’t have to know anything about each other in order to communicate. Add to this VRCO’s flat-to-3D translation efforts, and you could have something very cool indeed, like maybe a 3D rendering engine that’s platform-agnostic, and which could bridge two disparate virtual worlds. In my fantasy of what this stuff could do, I’m standing in Second Life, while you’re standing in There.com. Somewhere on the Internet there’s a bunch of OpenGL data representing the inside of my office, say. Assuming you could dynamically import that data to the places we’re standing (which I don’t think you can do at the moment), you could then have some Conduit-esque application passing data about our avatars and how we’re manipulating the environment back and forth between the apps. Presto, cross-platform 3D collaborative interaction. Wow. It’s just a fantasy, of course, but with things like Conduit in the pipeline (sorry, couldn’t resist), it seems it could one day be real. Or anyway, virtually real.