Talking about hyper realism in virtual environments: remember MellaniuM, a company specializing in “3D Virtual Real World™ that is realistic of the past, present, future, or imaginary world”? We posted about this company about a year ago.
This is the background I got at that time, meeting the Canadian Joe Rigby from MellaniuM:
We have successfully imported King’s College London (KCL’s) “Theatre of Pompey” into the UNREAL 2 platform”, so an enthusiastic Joe tried to explain me. “The technology I would like to present to you comprises a unique method of importing 3D Studio Max and AUTOCAD models into the UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004 multi-participant platform”, so he went on.
Now the technological ideas behind all this seem to be very different from those behind Second Life or similar virtual enviroments:”…the concept hinges on the ability to import high polygon models (static meshes) with high resolution textures into an MMO platform such as UNREAL. The environments and client are locally administered off your PC. Any web based browser client where the assets are stored remotely and must be downloaded as you travel through the virtual space can only result in lag and “less than immersive” latency effects. We have produced a movie to compare the graphical fidelity for archaeological visualizations of the MellaniuM application and Second Life.”
The movie compares the Theatre of Pompey and the Titanic rendered in Second Life and in UNREAL using the MellaniuM application:
A year ago Rigby showed me this video and commented using Skype. Today I (or rather my avatar) could for the first time actually walk around in such a very realistic environment. The global access has been made possible through the NORTEL web.alive (project chainsaw) delivery system.
On the MellaniuM website I read:
Could you ever imagine meeting up with 50,150 or even 500 people in an environment created to contain dimensionally accurate buildings with high resolution graphics and high polygon 3D models? It is now entirely possible to do so at the click of one single solitary URL weblink. (…)
In other words, this time I could meet Rigby and other participants in the realistic industrial environment you see here:
Depending on the purposes of those concerned, we see how the virtual worlds landscape seems to expand in all directions at once: 2,5 environments for easy access and maximum compatiblity with web tools and technologies, 3D environments like Second Life for those who want more immersion while still enabling a large audience to actually produce the world themselves, and the hyper realistic environments for certain professional applications or for even deeper immersive effects.
Roland Legrand
