At the very beginning you can see the camera zoom through OLIVE showing a California city which then morphs to a live view on the ground. The imagery is from Pictometry and was developed by Lockheed Martin, Forterra clients and developers.

Forterra are leading the pack when it comes to realistic terrain capabilities and have one of the ONLY geospatially accurate virtual worlds which enable these types of mirror world applications. It's great to see it in prime time!

If the clip below stutters, let it play for a bit to buffer with the audio off, then restart.

Current projects under development include brand marketing and cultural heritage. We've explored some interesting projects involving embedding AR images into optics for industrial and military apps but those are still in the idea stages.

Comments and project inquiries welcome!

You can read the summary on their blog and download the report here: http://thinkbalm.com/2009/05/26/thinkbalm-publishes-business-value-study/:

There are many charts included in the 36 page report which I found to be well written and useful.

I found this one especially compelling with my PhD research interest in 3d collaborative visualization. It is shown as the next biggest application after training, events and meetings as shown below. Our clients are very interested in 3d collaborative visualization but are mostly only in the exploratory stages.

Image courtesy of Thinkbalm, used with permission (thank you!).

I took a few pictures of the trade show and put them on Flickr with some comments:

I was fascinated by the Microsoft Surface display used by T-Mobile where they had several connected to look like a koi pond. I loaded my first HD video to YouTube of it (try it in 'HQ'!)

Here's the conclusion:

Cost cutting during a downturn is often necessary to ensure a company’s current profitability and future competitiveness. Rather than freezing all hiring and employee-development programs, companies should use this period as an opportunity to upgrade talent and better engage existing staff. This means reinvesting a percentage of the capital liberated from cost cutting into, for example, selective recruiting and development programs and in efforts to safeguard the culture and to redesign jobs so that they are more engaging to the remaining employees.

I think our new Virtual Instructor Led Training V-ILT just announced which we're developing with Brey Leino BroadSkill couldn't come at a better time. Effective training delivered more efficiently and at lower cost.

Meanwhile, interest in using the Forterra OLIVE platform for collaboration to save travel costs, improve efficiency and engagement continues to outpace pure training applications so it will be interesting to see whats more popular in a year or so. (Disclosure: Ambient is Forterras European service provider).

Steve Prentice, VP and Gartner Fellow will be kicking the session off with an overview of Enterprise Virtual Worlds. Steve wrote the Gartner report which predicted that 80% of active Internet users will have an avatar by 2011. I look forward to hearing what he has to say.

Send me a message via Twitter if you'd like to meet there, as usual I'll have tasty mobile demos...

I'll be speaking at the 2009 Learning Technologies Conference in London next month. Here's an excerpt from the recent press release on it below from TrainingPressReleases.com (check them out!).

After the hype around Second Life and stories of abandoned ghost towns empty of avatars, virtual worlds have continued to grow in use in organisational learning, with hundreds of organisations now delivering learning programmes through them. At the Learning Technologies Conference Marco Tippmer and Ron Edwards will answer what these organisations are doing right (and wrong), and how is learning now being delivered effectively in virtual worlds?

Ron Edwards, CEO, Ambient Performance, said: 'Virtual worlds are being used intensively for learning and development right now and the scope for future use is immense. Virtual worlds are excellent places for simulation and classroom training - offering potentially considerable savings for L&D organisations - and as performance support environments where users practice tasks before carrying them out in the real world.'

'We are now seeing virtual worlds being integrated with other collaborative learning technologies such as standards compliant e-learning, whiteboards, presentation tools, application sharing, etc, and are now seeing them extending to mobile with video, audio and messaging support. I expect this trend to continue as the L&D community searches for new and better ways to deliver training, including getting more value out of their existing learning assets as well as reducing reliance on classroom training that can be costly and less efficient.'

Register for Learning Technologies at http://www.learningtechologies.co.uk.
The Conference blog is here.

.It was my first time attending. It was great seeing the state of the art in simulations, displays, GIS data usage, Augmented Reality (ours has more potential), head mounted displays and innovative mobile learning by Forterra partners VCOM3D. I like Mark Oehlerts descriiption of experience known as /ITSEC best on his blog here.

I met a mind boggling amount of people including suppliers of great AI middleware, experts in GIS data, lots of our European customers and people we've been talking to about virtual world based solutions and of course some new ones too!

Here are a few pics:
The calm before the storm, here's Dr. LeRoy Heinrichs, formerly of SUMMIT and now with a new venture hung out with us quite a bit which was great. He continues to do pioneering medical vw projects.

Here's an example of being swamped during the live demos where we had dozens online going through various medical, homeland security and military demos. That's Bart Bartlett in the flesh with the mic leading the show.
(I've seen him in demos online some 30 times before meeting him in person!).

Off to Orlando for IITSEC conference


Originally uploaded by ron777.

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Online Registration ends tonight at midnight London time. If registering for the full conference use our discount code AMBIENTVIP for 10% off.

Hope to see you there!

Here is the conference overview from the organisers:

Virtual Worlds London, 20-21 October 2008, is the leading European event for businesses seeking to understand and maximize business strategies within virtual worlds. VW London takes place at The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, two blocks from Parliament. The event includes 80+ speakers focused on two tracks: 2D and 3D Web Strategies: Consumer Virtual Worlds and Immersive Training and Collaboration: Virtual Worlds for Business. Join us for exclusive keynotes from Linden Lab and Google and a special group keynote from Intel, Samsung, ngi Group Ventures, Electric Sheep Company and virtual worlds veteran Bruce Damer.

Plus all attendees receive 3 exclusive market research reports: a £660 value: Virtual Worlds Markets: Key Strategies Deployed in 2008 and Predictions for 2009, Seven Emerging Truths that will Drive Future Adoption of Virtual Worlds and Virtual Worlds and Social Networks.

We're also experimenting with combining the Intronetworks social networking community with Second Life to give Virtual World participants the ability to connect with others with similar interests. You can give it a go by registering on http://sgi.intronetworks.com and following further instructions there.