Avatars to run Altadyn business meetings
Company's $41-a-month Online Meeting service enables businesses to customize a virtual world for conducting meetings with presentations, IM, and Skype conversation.
Altadyn, a company that specializes in 3D virtual-world creation platforms, announced on Tuesday that it has released a new product that will turn business meetings into a living virtual world.
Dubbed Online Meeting, Altadyn's service aims to bridge the gap between 3D virtual worlds and Web conferencing. The service offers basic conferencing features like shared presentations, instant messaging, and live conversation through Skype, but it believes its main selling point is that it uses the company's 3DXplorer virtual platform to create a virtual world that resembles a conference room.
Companies can even build their own room to tailor it to their preferences. Each participant in the online environment is represented by an avatar that can sit at a table, walk around the room, and interact with other avatars that are close.
"In our experience, when users have more interactive options, the meeting is more entertaining, inclusive, and personal than the standard (teleconference), which participants might approach more passively," Altadyn President Darius Lahoutifard said in a statement. "Users pay more attention to the proceedings and feel more present in the animated context."
To enhance the experience, Online Meeting displays all user content on the projection screen in the virtual conference space, and presenter avatars can use a virtual laser-beam point to highlight important points during the presentation.
In order to deploy Online Meeting, companies will first need to use Altadyn's 3DXplorer solution, which powers the conference software. Once subscribed, companies will pay $41 per month for use of Online Meeting.