IEEE STANDARDS WORKING GROUP MEETING IN MELLANIUM OFFICES

Andrew Hughes, President of Designing Digitally, kindly arranged to have a meeting of the IEEE STANDARDS Working Group in the web.alive office of MellaniuM at 4pm. EST on Friday 24th Sept. Tom Starai, Information Management Coordinator at IEEE, has co-ordinated this working group. Since its inception it has attracted a spectrum of individuals with both the experience and passion to develop the terms of reference and capability to lay the foundations of accepted standards for virtual environments.

The meeting was well attended with twelve participants and questions were posited about content development, maximum possible concurrency and instance size capability. Arn Hyndman, Gino Brancatelli and Chris Hardy from AVAYA attended and were more than happy to answer all the questions from the Working Group members.

1. With respect to how the objects are created in WA (Web.alive). Some are created directly in the WA editor (an enhanced UNREALED 3.0) and some are imported as static meshes from commercial tools like MAX, Maya, Blender, Lightwave, etc. CAD drawings have been imported to create Architectural and Engineering objects. As far as the learning curve of UNREAL ED; most universities use the editor for courses in gaming and architecture and there exists a huge tutorial data base UDN web site.
2. The issue of concurrency was debated and it is a simple matter of server limitation. However >200 people have been accommodated in one instance. In essence thousands can be online with sufficient server availability.
3. Instances can be as large as 10km.x10km.

(Hat tip to Andrew Hughes for the screenshot)