Two other platforms are Sun's Wonderland and OpenCroquet/Cobalt. IEd brings COLLADA file format support to realXtend enabling fully interchangeable content between the platforms.
The Immersive Education Initiative, a collaboration
project of over 400 universities and educational institutes,
has officially selected realXtend as one of the supported
platforms. IEd has already started to work on realXtend and reports
a progress on the COLLADA file format support.
The IEd continues to support SUN
Microsystem's Wonderland and OpenCroquet,
the addition of realXtend is a significant step in the right
direction for the service interoperability.
"We are working now to add support for COLLADA to realXtend.
We have COLLADA mesh import into the OGRE engine working; textures
and lighting are coming next." says Aaron E. Walsh, the
managing director of Immersive Education.
The COLLADA support for realXtend is a project of the Open File
Formats Technical Working Group at Immersive Education (OFF.TWG).
The charter of OFF.TWG is online for at: http://mediagrid.org/groups/technology/OFF.TWG/
Once the COLLADA support in realXtend is implemented, both
Wonderland and realXtend will support the OFF.TWG's standard.
Immersive Education is also working with the Croquet/Cobalt team
and it is expected that all 3 Immersive Education virtual world
platforms support the same file format for content portability and
interoperability.
First realXtend sever nodes have been already set up at
Immersive Education. They were recently demonstrated at Immersive Education: ASIA events in
Japan, University of Aizu.
The Immersive Education Initiative is an international
collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes,
consortia and companies that are working together to define and
develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities
of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training
systems.
In an earlier article Maxping wrote about the COLLADA contest announced by IEd, this latest
news offers an insight into which platforms will be suitable for
the contest.
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