Forterra Systems has announced OLIVE, an SDK for building virtual worlds.
For those who don’t know the history: once upon a time, there was one company called There, and it made a world called There.com. There had trouble gaining traction with its consumer service, and eventually, there were moves made to shut it down. This despite the fact that it featured, IMHO, some of the best interaction design in social virtual worlds — in some ways, just ahead of its time.
There.com was rescued from oblivion by effectively splitting the company in two; Makena ran There.com as a consumer product, and Forterra took the technology and used it to build military sims for the government, etc. (The original founder, Will Harvey, left all of this behind, and founded IMVU, which has since had stellar success).
Then There.com gained traction after all — first as a teen hangout, then as the white-labeled engine behind Virtual Laguna Beach and The Hills. See? Ahead of its time. What the There platform offered was tailor-made for a pure chat hangout with minor embedded activities: user-content, but a tightly controlled pipeline, high ease of use, built-in physics…
Meanwhile, some of those same reasons made Forterra an attractive platform for training. Among them, features that were complete overkill for consumer applications: a true spherical world, neural net AI, and so on. Given Forterra’s background for the last few years, it’s unsurprising that the press release centers around training applications:
“We are very excited about the release of OLIVE 1.0,” said Forterra’s President, Robert Gehorsam. “This product brings the most compelling on-line capability not only to the military simulation and training community, but also to operational communities. It expands our markets to education, intelligence and virtually any community that requires distributed and networked operational and training collaboration tools.”
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I was looking at that press release yesterday after seeing it mentioned somewhere. But perhaps of interest to you is that this morning I saw an ABC News (net)Nightline report discussing the use of vr for the treatment of PTSD. Looked like the same software was being used.
There’s a story that goes with the video: http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=3249556&page=1
Wow thanks for that Raph, what an incredible story!
I beta tested There.com. I remember standing my avatar behind a guy and girl chatting, running circles around them, and emoting nonstop. They were flirting and became annoyed. They told me to stop and go away. I continued, of course. They logged out. ;p
Any idea on the pricing to license this?
Hey Raph – you got the story exactly right. When I first saw the technology in 2002, before I joined the company (when There was still in beta), I had the same sense, that the technology was wildly beyond anything else and beyond what was a minimum threshold for consumer acceptance. I think that’s still true today, based on pretty much every tech eval that third-parties have done on OLIVE. The sim engine is still like no other, and the avatars the same. What we did the past couple of years was crack it open so there would be an SDK for developers and designers to work on.
I would say that when we did split the company (or rather when we re-started it in 2004, the intent was never to do only defense-oriented apps, but let’s face it, they fund some pretty impressive R&D, and they are a pretty educated customer in terms of this stuff. We’ve been fortunate to be able to keep building a platform and applications at the same time. In fact we have laid out a roadmap in terms of market areas and applications that is pretty broad. Training is easy to understand, but the use cases gets more interesting as the technology evolves, and more importantly, the users themselves, start to generate new ideas.
csven – i didn’t see the story, and while we’re doing some pretty amazing work in behavioral therapy (actually being done by medical partners), we’re not (yet) doing ptsd-related work. I’ll have some stories to share soon, I hope.
[…] Early this morning I rushed out the news that Forterra had released the OLIVE SDK. Had I waited just two or three hours, however, I would have been able to include this amazing bit of background on the company and their interwoven history with There, courtesy of the games visionary Raph Koster. […]
“What we did the past couple of years was crack it open so there would be an SDK for developers and designers to work on.”
Robert, is this related to recent comments made by the new company working with Makena (sorry, forget their name); comments about improving their pipeline? Or is that a separate, unrelated effort?
And thanks for the clarification. Out of curiosity I’ll have to look into what engine was being used.
It’s indirectly related. Makena uses the same basic architecture as OLIVE but a different codebase, and has some divergent functionality, so their pipeline work is somewhat (but not completely) specific to them. There are multiple initiatives going on. The art pipeline is only part of what’s being dealt with; there’s an SDK as well for software development, and some other editors as well. It’s been very interesting so far to link other simulation systems into OLIVE; next step, live.
Like the poor, griefers will always be with us…. š