3pointD.com

Following the news of the new mainframe platform for virtual worlds that IBM is working on, I had the chance to talk to David Gelardi, IBM’s vice president of industry solutions, who is heading up the effort. “This is a brand new way to support the needs of virtual worlds in an environment that begins to look like 3D commerce,” Gelardi said. “Think more in terms of a future state where there is a transaction taking place that is a buying experience of some kind.” The “hybrid environment of immense power and flexibility” that IBM is creating will rely on the Cell’s processing power for rendering, the mainframe for cryptography and its ability to handle the processing needs of a massively multiuser enviroment, and Hoplon’s software for physics and messaging.

“I would argue that the world doesn’t yet understand the promise of [virtual world] technology,” Gelardi said. “We see this technology moving into banking and retail and anything where the consumer is involved in a transaction of commerce that they would today do over the Web, online shopping, online banking. The problem is that rendering is kind of weak. We haven’t figured out how to accelerate that yet, and how to marry that to transactions.” (more…)