MELLANIUM LAUNCHES DOTVIDI.COM

The premise of dotvidi.com is that it will offer an independent web portal for all of the world’s principal heritage. Contributors, stakeholders and advocates worldwide all combine to develop and sustain life and quality in its content. The portal preserves the most important buildings, artefacts and human achievement forever.
Held in a highly graphic and digital form, the world’s heritage may be viewed by anybody with internet access. A range of supplementary features and services ensures that dotvidi.com becomes a central repository for entertaining, educating and experiencing the finest achievements of modern man for generations to come.

The System
A computer framework is built around a proven set of 3D visualisation software tools. The framework is made available to expert contributors that can model buildings, industrial archaeology and other important creations of human endeavour. Alternatively, a digitising service can be provided to work closely with stakeholders that have an interest in making their particular area of expertise or subject knowledge available to view. Resulting environments are established in true 3D over the internet and any key objects can have associated attributes attached. This means that further action and information can be taken when viewing such as download of supplementary video or online purchasing of facsimiles. Advanced graphical interfaces also mean that delivery can also be made fully immersive such as in a theatre or cut down versions made available for mobile handsets. Hosted on a server farm and deployed over broadband, advanced interface and navigation techniques ensure a pleasurable experience is offered to all participants.

Business Model
The portal is offered free of charge to base users wherever they are. Stakeholders share in the ownership model and contribute financially to running the business. This is supplemented by grants from internationally interested associations. Modelling can be done through various means and independent experts will be encouraged to add content on an ad hoc basis thus retaining variability and return power. Sub-licensing (e.g. to TV), e-commerce and VIP memberships will also add to income streams.

Implementation
Our current plan is to build a business and investment proposition over 4 months triggered in early stages by grant support for our consultant’s costs. We aim on completing phase-1 of our development by Q4 2009 at which point we will have a portal concentrating on industrial archaeology visualisation and limited income streams. Break even is anticipated in year 3.

.

STOP THE PRESSES!

.

MELLANIUM SCANS THE HORIZON AND SEES AN EVEN BRIGHTER FUTURE

MellaniuM can announce that they have chalked up another technological first in the virtual world arena. During the conference proceedings of VSSM 2008 Marco St.Pierre , HANDYSCAN 3D Director at CREAFORM3D, who markets hand held scanners for generating 3D models met with Ken Rigby of MellaniuM who are producing virtual realistic environments in the UNREAL platform. The UNREAL platform has some unique attributes for developing environments with per-pixel shading, lighting and particle effects. He enquired about the potential for importing scanned museum assets into the environments generated in the UNREAL platform by the MellaniuM application. We obviously saw a huge potential for any collaboration that could yield virtual environments festooned with realistic replicas of entire famous museum collections from around the world. Within the week we received from CREAFORM3D a Chinese mask model reminiscent of an Easter Island profile with a floral, jade green texture overlay and a bird themed headpiece.
The 3D model itself was a relatively high polygon sample which was intended to test the MellaniuM application to some extent. However the final model was successfully imported into UNREAL and looks identical to the as scanned actual mask.

Chinese Mask scanned with the VIUSCAN from

CREAFORM3D and imported into UNREAL

The VIUSCAN hand-held device is capable of scanning objects as big as a car and has been used successfully to reproduce a digital copy of a fountain (in the order of 6-7 metres high). The possibilities are enormous with respect to recreating archaeological reconstructions which we are positing in our new business concept dotVidi.com. It is entirely possible at this present moment to import 3D interpretations of the ancient buildings of, lets say for example, Athens or Rome into an interactive, multi-user domain. However, more importantly, an impressive, immersive experience of the elaborate décor can now be reproduced by importing the digital representations of the furniture, statues and fountains into the monumental digital recreation. The assets required to realize this dream actually exist on digital storage devices all over the globe we only need the collective will and enthusiasm to develop the vision into an astounding, virtual, ancient panoply for all to experience together over the Internet.