Thursday, March 11, 2010

Teleplace Open House webinar, March 10 2010


Last night I attended a 3D Webinar - Teleplace Open House: a 30 minute walk-through of an exciting new technology that is revolutionizing the way people meet, train, and collaborate. Immersive 3D meeting environments will change the way you do business. Come learn about a revolutionary new technology that is currently being used by other Teleplace customers, including: Intel, British Petroleum, US Navy, US Air Force, Chevron, and more.


We distribute Teleplace in several European countries, and I am used to small (5-10 participants) workgroup meetings in Teleplace, where all participants can talk, stream their webcam video, share their desktop and edit documents. What I wanted to see yesterday was a Teleplace stress test with a larger crowd. I already knew Teleplace is a great application for remote enterprise and work-group collaboration, but the ability to handle larger audiences (50-100 participants) is important for e-learning applications. Thanks to the meeting management features of Teleplace, which permit one or more moderators taking full control of the meeting and railroading participants as appropriate (for example, muting all mics and unmuting those who raise their hand to ask a question), the webinar ran very smoothly and I am now confident that Teleplace is suitable for e-learning applications with large audiences.


I have taken a 10 minutes video to show parts of the presentation and to illustrate various examples of using Teleplace for interactive webinars and professional e-learning projects. The video is available on blip.tv and Youtube. The .mp4 file (10 minutes, 75 MB), is available for download here.

5 comments:

  1. Wow that's pretty impressive as a workplace collaboration tool, I must say. It's not the prettiest UI and 3d space, but does seem to do the job.

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  2. @rik - yes, Teleplace does do the job. Besides structured presentations and events like this for larger groups, it permits very spontaneous and immersive work-group meetings where everyone can interact with everything and everyone, stream video, share the local screen, upload and edit documents, uploads 3D models...

    The 3D spaces can be designed with standard 3D modeling tools, and can be much more complex and "creative" than the sample workspaces shown in the video. However, many users prefer simple and streamlined environments. Many users, like me, prefer simple geometric avatars to humanoid avatars (both types are shown in the pictures above). The simple avatars can wear a webcam video on their faces, which is a big plus for many applications.

    Teleplace is not a Second Life equivalent, but a different platform for different applications. It is not meant as a casual, public metaverse like Second Life, but as an enterprise platform for rich collaboration and e-learning.

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  3. Big meetings will require a p2p architecture (which is resistant to hacks) to better distribute data. Servers will run into problems if we have sims/VRs of hundreds or even thousands of concerrent users.

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  4. @Khannea - Teleplace is based on Open Croquet, which has a p2p architecture. There is a central server but most of the work is done by client machines in p2p mode, which helps managing the server load.

    In fact, this meeting was very smooth and with no noticeable lag.

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