Glob – The Indusgeeks Blog

Los Altos Hills, CA, May 5, 2010 – Innovation in Learning, a pioneer in the field of Immersive HealthCare Learning, Training and Collaboration, announced today  that it has entered into a global partnership with India-headquartered Indusgeeks Solutions, a leading virtual worlds development and serious games company.

Under the terms of the agreement, Innovation in Learning and Indusgeeks will work jointly to address the global Healthcare Training and Simulation market for both products and services.

“Innovation in Learning is excited to have Indusgeeks as our Global Partner”, said Dr. Parvati Dev, Cofounder and CEO of Innovation in Learning.  “Innovation in Learning seeks to empower healthcare professionals and students by presenting new immersive learning experiences for them on a browser based, easy to use, hosted platform called CliniSpace^TM. Indusgeeks offers dedicated technical and design solutions within the Immersive Internet domain. Immersive, interactive, virtual solutions like CliniSpace^TM provide medical and nursing schools as well as hospitals, an easy to use, hosted solution to achieve their training and quality objectives.”.  “This partnership” Dr. Dev added, “will also allow IIL to enter new Asian markets, especially India, which is a major future market for the Healthcare training and collaboration sectors.”

“Innovation in Learning has great credentials in the Healthcare training market, owing to the fact that they’re being led by accomplished academics like Dr. Dev and Dr. Heinrichs (Dr. Wm. LeRoy Heinrichs is an Emeritus Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine).” said Siddharth Banerjee , CEO of Indusgeeks.  “We are privileged to partner with IIL and help extend its expertise to a 3D immersive platform like CliniSpace^TM, a first of its kind solution in the Healthcare Training space.”  “Indusgeeks will also market and provide support for the Clinispace^TM platform across Indian and other Asian markets” mentioned Siddharth. “In addition, we will also jointly offer our services to create custom simulations and training solutions for global clients who are looking to create their own solutions on platforms like Second Life, OpenSim, Open Wonderland, Shockwave, Flash, Unity3D etc. in the Healthcare market.”

According to Dr. Heinrichs,  co-founder of IIL, “Our future plan and vision for this partnership, is to enable current generations of students to learn collaboratively and experientially using online virtual medical environments. Here, they can immediately gauge the application of their knowledge, skill, and attitude with the virtual patient’s responses.  We hope this innovative learning methodology will revolutionise medical education in the US and across the world.”

About Innovation in Learning: Innovation in Learning Inc. (IIL) provides products and services for virtual training environments in the healthcare sector. IIL’s products include CliniSpace™, a 3D immersive medical environment hosted on, and accessed via the Internet;  DynaPatient™, virtual patients with dynamic pathophysiology models; and clinical training scenarios, curricula and assessment tools. IIL’s principals are leaders in the healthcare simulation field, with numerous publications and recognition for their research.

About Indusgeeks Solutions Pvt. Ltd: Indusgeeks is an award winning 3D immersive solutions and virtual worlds development company. Voted as one of the hottest start-ups in India for the year 2010, Indusgeeks is a market leader in creating rich 3D and 2D, browser based, immersive virtual environments that work on low-end hardware and bandwidth. Indusgeeks’ global clientele includes the Govt. of Dubai, Tata Indicom, The Brand Union, Gazzetta dello Sport, Mahindra Satyam, Idaho State University etc.

Official Press Release here: http://www.indiaprwire.com/pressrelease/health-care/2010050649938.htm

Indusgeeks Solutions is proud to announce that we are taking the next step in the company’s evolution.

We are launching a product and services line under the flagship brand ‘Metamersive™’. This will cater to the Serious Games, Enterprise Virtual Worlds ( including Second Life Enterprise deployment) and 3D Simulations market. We seek to fulfill the next generation training, learning and collaboration needs of Global organisations, SMEs and Educational institutions with our Metamersive™ solutions.

Indusgeeks Solutions Pvt. Ltd. will continue to cater to the entertainment, marketing & advertising (advergaming) and casual gaming market under the ‘Indusgeeks’ brand.

Why this distinction ?

• Clarity of Messaging: As applications for 3D interactive, immersive technologies keep growing we needed to present a clearer picture of our products and services to our clients.

• Greater Internal Efficiency: The clear segmentation between entertainment & marketing and 3D training,learning and collaboration (3DTLC) led us to differentiate the product and service lines for the two.

• Better Service Standards and Delivery: This allows us to create deeper domain expertise to serve our clients within the specific verticals. And also to have dedicated client managers with relevant industry experience.

What’s new here?

Services under the Indusgeeks brand :

• Advergaming : We have been creating branding experiences in Second Life. Ref : Tata Indicom campaign, CRY etc. But these branding and marketing related immersive experiences are moving off standalone client based virtual worlds towards a more browser based virtual experience. To address this need we at Indusgeeks are now working on 2D and 3D branded immersive experiences (games, machinimas, virtual tours etc.) using Shockwave, Unity 3D and Flash and other technologies.

• Casual Games : In tune with the casual gaming revolution worldwide, we are using our expertise to serve clients within this domain.

Products under Metamersive™ :

• Improving ‘Metamersive™ Products by adding new 3D platforms like Unity3D , Open Sim and Project Wonderland, with the addition of authoring tools, SCORM support etc.

• Healthcare Education

• Security and Defense

Major theme for 2010 will be the same as 2009 – ‘applications of virtual world technologies’.

Motto for 2010 : Indusgeeks seeks to be the definitive company in the sector of 3D immersive, interactive technologies.

Since our inception we’ve been harping on about finding ‘killer applications’ for 3D technologies. It seems the time has come and 2010 will be a golden year for VW apps.

This change will be reflected in our website by February.

Our Company Motto for all times however remains the same:  And The Geek shall inherit the Virtual World ! 

Happy 2010 to all of you!

In the last post on the State of Virtual Worlds we covered my impressions from the Engage Expo’09 at San Jose. In this post we’ll look to answer why companies are moving back to basics with Virtual Worlds.

The phrase “Virtual World” became so popular in 2006-08 that almost anyone doing anything remotely 3D or 2D started ‘tagging’ their work as such. I think that led to a vast amount of generalization. Increasingly,now  the trend is towards the opposite end. We see most companies trying to distance themselves from the term. So words like “Immersive”, “Interactive” and “Real time” are being used with more frequency to describe environments which would have passed off as “Virtual Worlds” about a year back .

Ironically, these words were being used to describe “Virtual Worlds” back in 2007 as well. This movement back to look at fundamentals of what “Virtual Worlds” mean and do, is not limited to semantics only. Most companies including ours are trying to go back to basics and keep what is important and shed what is not. I think the need to make 3D environments complex started when people thought that all virtual worlds had to mimic something like Second Life.  Which meant most 3D environments needed :

1. Multiuser capability -with very high concurrences ( without any thought for whether those levels were required for the solution)
2. Full 3D – high graphic requirements  ( again without any thought for whether a 3D environment was even required for the solution let alone high graphics)
3. Ability to author objects – ( most environments do not require users to be able to create content- most clients still insisted on this capability!)

These requirements led to over engineering and unnecessary cost and timel; with real Return on Investment ( RoI) falling  as the capabilities were rarely used. Or in the worst case, due to the necessity to include these features costs would shoot up ; and the client would back out due to budget constraints.

Over a period of time though the vendors and clients have become more aware of  the what and how of using  these 3D environments.  Expectations have become more realistic and so have outlays and billings. This rationalization was necessary and good for the industry.

Thanks to spectacular early failures, the recession and increasing realism in part of the industry advocates and vendors; in 2009 the market has become more realistic and sustainable. Now these environments , especially for enterprise deployment, previously grouped under “Virtual Worlds” as a whole get categorised as :

1. Interactive – at this stage it can be 3D or 2D
2. Immersive – mostly 3D but could also be 2.5 or 2D.
3. 3D – Only if required
4. Online – hosted on a server either connected or not connected to the Internet.
5. Multiuser – only if required with defined concurrency levels;usually between 10-100 concurrent users for most enterprise type environments.
6. High graphics – only if required. Infact most clients are willing to compromise high end graphics for the ease and savings associated with being able to run these environments on  commodity grade computers.
7. Closed authoring – almost no enterprise asks for content creation capabilities for users. In fact it’s considered a nuisance in most cases.

Thus we see an increasing shift towards distinguishing between features which were previously bundled together into what came to be defined as a “Virtual World”. And this modular approach has led to higher Returns on Investment and faster deployment time. In doing so, the lines between Serious Games, Simulations and what used to be called “Virtual Worlds” is becoming more distinct. This is healthy and lets virtual worlds like Second Life do what they are good at doing,namely create a virtual community based around art, entertainment and virtual goods, while keeping a limited and focused tool set for other immersive applications. Ultimately, I think the industry really didn’t have any choice but to get back to basics and this may yet lead to the redemption of 3D , multi-user, online, immersive, interactive environments aka ‘virtual worlds’

- Sid Banerjee

Update  Dec 9, 2009 :

The event was a very interesting and the video for the same is available here :

ThinkBalm Global Unlecture Event

Thanks to Erica and Sam Driver of ThinkBalm for editing and posting this video.

****************************************************

I am posting directly from Dr. Yesha Sivan’s blog who has done an excellent job of explaining the event here :

On November 6, 2009, the ThinkBalm Innovation Community will be holding an event called “Un-lecture no. 5: ‘Global’.” Three presenters will talk about Immersive Internet adoption trends and use cases in their region of the world: Yesha Sivan on Israel and the Middle East, Siddharth Banerjee on India and surrounds, and Claus Nehmzow on Hong Kong and region. Barbara Westmoreland will wrap things up by demo’ing part of nTeams island, which her company uses for global team-building activities.

How to RSVP: Reply to the LinkedIn group:http://tinyurl.com/yj2p2f8 . Please make sure “Follow this discussion” is checked off so you get the logistics details once we’ve finalized them, and you receive an event reminder via email.

* Who: Immersive Internet advocates, implementers, explorers, and tech marketers

* What: Three presenters will talk about Immersive Internet adoption trends and use cases in their region of the world: Yesha Sivan on Israel and the Middle East, Siddharth Banerjee on India, and Claus Nehmzow on Hong Kong. Then, Barbara Westmoreland will wrap things up by demo’ing part of the nTeams island her company uses to facilitate global team-building efforts. For more info about the un-lecture event format see this ThinkBalm Innovation Community video on YouTube: The Innovation Un-Lecture, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PiuJPmSQ_M .

* Where and how: Second Life, details TBD. We’ll use in-world voice.

* When: Friday, Nov. 6th from 8-9AM PDT (which is the same as Second Life time). Here is a link to link to the Time Zone Converter:http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc .

* Why: Share and gain insights into what’s happening with work-related adoption of immersive technologies around the globe. Learn what other members of the ThinkBalm Innovation Community are working on. Spend time with other members.

Please email or call with any questions.

Erica Driver, Principal
ThinkBalm
www.thinkbalm.com
ph: +1(401)592-0170
email: erica — at — thinkbalm.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/EricaDriver