Via: Lenovo eLounge – Welcome to the Lenovo eLounge !
Experience a truly virtual 3D on-line shopping experience. It is similar to shopping in a retail store except you are on-line and in control of your real time interactive shopping experience.
- Create your own personal avatar
- Browse and interact with Lenovo virtual products
- Walk around and share your experience with customers from around the globe
- Get support from one of their virtual avatar product specialists
Nortel last week said it landed PC maker Lenovo as a customer for its virtual world business application.
The win comes a little over a year after Nortel announced incubation efforts to develop web.alive, a collaborative, browser-based application for enterprises that provides an interactive 3D experience with voice, graphics and avatars.
Web.alive is designed to facilitate internal collaboration and customer interactions over the Web and in real time.
Lenovo is using web.alive in an online virtual store as a way to give consumers a new avenue for e-commerce. The Lenovo "eLounge" virtual store allows shoppers to create personalized avatars to walk around the store and browse through products while interacting with other globally dispersed shoppers and sales staff.
Nortel licensed Epic Games' Unreal Engine platform as the basis for web.alive.
The application is the result of an Incubation Program launched by Nortel in late 2007 to encourage the company's developers to think beyond incremental product improvements to the creation of new products, technologies, and business models that will have a "disruptive and transformative impact" on the market, according to the company.
Nortel Uses Epic Games Engine for Lenovo eLounge
Nortel has kept quiet about using the Unreal Engine for the web.alive tool. But in choosing Epic, Nortel utilized the most popular game engine today. Naturally, Epic uses Unreal for its own mega-selling hits "Gears of War" and "Gears of War 2," but game developers around the globe are also using Unreal across multiple platforms.
The success doesn’t stop there. As Nortel discovered, Unreal’s rendering capabilities make it a creative choice for applications such as architecture and avatars. Engineers have used Unreal for multiple building projects for the Dallas Cowboys football team and other clients.
In announcing the use of Unreal, web.alive’s chief architect, Arn Hynman, said the engine “provides an array of core technologies, content creation tools and support infrastructure.”“By collaborating with Epic Games and licensing the Unreal Engine, we are enabling our customers to benefit from the same platform that powers industry-leading video games and complex 3D simulations,” he added.
About Lenovo
Lenovo is dedicated to building exceptionally engineered personal computers.
Lenovo strives to be a new world company that makes award-winning PCs for customers. It operates as a company uninhibited by walls or organizational structures using world sourcing to harness the power of innovation across its global team.
Formed by Lenovo Group’s acquisition of the former IBM Personal Computing Division, the company develops, manufactures and markets reliable, high-quality, secure and easy-to-use technology products and services worldwide.
Lenovo has major research centers in Yamato, Japan; Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, China; and Raleigh, North Carolina.