It’s not even Friday yet, and there are two new virtual worlds to talk about. One so new that only Robert Scoble has been known to actually see it so far, the other built on top of something a little older…
Outback Online doesn’t even have a screen-shot yet, but its been demo’d to some (e.g. Robert Scoble), who seem impressed. Claiming better graphics and better scalability than Second Life (but I’m guessing they have yet to really test the scalability) as well as the ability to create your own environments, it’s clearly aiming to meet – or beat – Second Life feature for feature. As it says on the homepage:
Imagine if it was possible to build any world you dream of that was just for you and your friends. A club, a new planet, a race track with less gravity, a city in the fog…all infinitely scalable.
Then imagine that you create the rules of these virtual worlds – the games to be played, the things to be done.
Then imagine your desktop as a way into your creation.
Now you won’t just chat with your friends, you will play games, destroy planets, listen to music, watch movies, dance…
I’ve signed up for beta, and hope to have an opportunity to try it out…
Qwaq Forums is a proprietry platform built on top of OpenCroquet. I would have written about it yesterday, but due to a typo in the article that first made me aware of it, I wasted time searching for “Qwak” instead. Which is an old 2D platform game…
Anyway, Qwaq Forums have been built on top of OpenCroquet - the open source peer-to-peer multi-user virtual world technology. Qwaq has a very definate business collaboration spin on things:
Qwaq Forums are unique: they are virtual spaces for real work. Like offices and meeting rooms, Qwaq Forums are places where users can go to work, to collaborate with others, and to identify and solve issues.
You can download a data sheet from here, and via the web site you can request a demo (I suspect they might be a bit busy over the next week or two!). So far only a single screenshot, but the datasheet’s list of ways to add content includes:
- Drag and drop importing from popular graphic file formats, pdf and plain text documents
- Mpeg-2 video
- Google Sketchup models
And of course, ‘in-world’ model creation using tools that are part of Qwaq itself. Collaboration tools alse demonstrate the business and real-world focus of Qwaq, in particular the inclusion of desktop-sharing.
I’ve not requested a demo yet. I suspect it might take them a while to work through the ones they have scheduled already!
