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Serious Games For The Enterprise: Forterra Wins Innovation In VWs Award



PRESS RELEASE

Forterra Named Winner of "Innovation in Virtual Worlds for Enterprise" Award

Virtual Worlds Expo

SAN MATEO, California - Forterra Systems, the market and technology leader in enterprise virtual worlds, announced today that it was awarded the prestigious Innovation in Virtual Worlds for Enterprise at the Virtual World Expo held September 3rd and 4th in Los Angeles.

These awards recognize significant achievements in innovation to companies in five categories: Consumer, Enterprise, Youth, Pioneer, and Overall Innovation.



A panel of leading authorities judged all the industry vendors for their contribution to bringing the most impactful features into their virtual world platform over the last year for enterprise usage.

The panel of top analysts and media included Steve Prentice, VP Research and Fellow, Gartner Group; Erica Driver, Co-Founder and Principal, ThinkBalm; Christian Renaud, CEO, Technology Intelligence Group; Joey Seiller, Editor, Virtual Worlds News; Robert Bloomfield, Founder and Host, Metanomics; and Nic Mitham, Managing Director, K Zero.

Erica Driver of ThinkBalm announced the award indicating "Forterra is a small company doing big things in the Immersive Internet platforms market. Forterra was selected for its leadership releasing advanced collaboration and learning features into its OLIVE platform over the last year, providing value to enterprises."

“Every Forterra employee, customer, and partner is extremely proud of the recognition we have achieved through winning this award,” said Dave Rolston, CEO of Forterra Systems. “We’re gratified that our hard work to identify and address how our OLIVE virtual world platform can transform enterprise business processes has resonated so positively with leading industry experts.”

The key capabilities Forterra has released or will release in Q4, 2008 include:

  • Displaying on 3D screens and viewing by all participants streaming video (Windows Media Player® based), Microsoft PowerPoint files, collaborative whiteboards, and any software application running on a Windows desktop.
  • Integration and display of either industry standard learning-based Shareable Content Objects (SCOs) or web-based content displayed through a browser in one of three modes within an OLIVE 3D scene.
  • Development of a Lotus Sametime® plug-in so users can schedule or instantly invite colleagues to join immersive, media rich 3D meetings directly from their Sametime client. 
  • A Meetings content pack featuring professionally developed 3D meeting environments including an auditorium, board, media and conference rooms, training facilities, a hotel, and a mansion for corporate offsites.
  • Distributed 3D record-and-replay of any session including voice and audio, avatar movements, behaviors, and gestures.
  • Support of 3D model import into OLIVE for Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya, Google Sketchup, Blender, Poser Pro, FaceGen, and Softimage, and other content authoring tools which provide COLLADA file export options.
  • Pioneering of a Paged Terrain File (PTF) open standard which enables importing terrain databases and satellite imagery for mirror world and other real-world applications.
About Forterra Systems

Forterra Systems is the leader in providing enterprise grade virtual world technology for the corporate, healthcare, government, education, and entertainment industries. Forterra's software and services enable organizations to train, plan, rehearse, and collaborate using new media technologies integrated into a compelling 3D virtual world. Using the OLIVE™ (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment) platform and industry standard PC hardware, customers can rapidly generate realistic, collaborative, 3D Internet solutions that scale from single user applications to large scale simulated environments supporting many thousands of concurrent users for public and private use cases.