3pointD.com

There’s a nice article in the Orange County Register describing the ways people have begun to use virtual worlds as meeting spaces for their real-world ventures. Columnist Colin Stewart describes the conferences held by Aerospace Corporation software engineer Michael O’Brien in the virtual world of Second Life, but he also touches on the Miramar 3D collaborative workspace tool that Intel has been working on for some time.

Stewart quite correctly points out that while Second Life presents a fully rendered 3D world, its graphics and other capabilities are not quite up to what you can find in most flat collaborative or Web-conferencing tools. Intel’s Miramar is intended to address some of those drawbacks, though it won’t really be a virtual world.

Eleanor Wynn, a “social technology architect” in Intel’s Information Technology Group, is working on a more sophisticated teleconferencing program inspired by the 3-D graphics and multitasking of online games. The program, called Miramar, displays documents, contacts and communication links floating in a virtual landscape. Because the view appears to be three-dimensional, each person at the meeting can see and use more of those tools than on an ordinary 2-D computer screen.

Intel is still in “pathfinder mode,” according to Wynn. Of course, I’m waiting for the day you can drag a document out of Miramar and drop it into Second Life. Nonetheless, it’s nice to see some 3pointD ideas getting their claws into a major player.