Behind the Firewall: Creating Private, Secure, Commercial Virtual Worlds

While much of the attention on virtual worlds has focused on entertainment applications, there is a tremendous demand for private and secured virtual spaces for both enterprise and commercial markets.
In fact, these qualities are crucial to the wider adoption of virtual worlds as professional collaborative and training environments. Many companies are now looking into how to create their own “intraverse” (3D interactive intranet).

Forterra (http://www.forterrainc.com) solves the problems of security, scalability, privacy, integration, and customization specifically for this market. Laura Kusumoto and Jon Watte will present how applications are built using the Forterra On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment
(OLIVE) platform for corporate, medical, entertainment and military organizations. This presentation explains how interactive 3D content gets developed or imported from industry leading tools. It will also illustrate how the OLIVE architecture works with plug-ins, and how finished applications are developed for clients. Laura’s team has accumulated 400 man-years perfecting their current process to adapt and deploy content to a real-time, interactive, virtual environment.

Discussion will center on the architectural foundation for the OLIVE platform, and specific technical aspects of creating finished applications.
A real-time, live interactive demo will be presented.

About the Presenters:

Laura Kusumoto, VP Forterra Studios
Laura Kusumoto has over 20 years of experience in engineering, operations, creative design, 3D graphics, and AI. Before coming to Forterra Systems, Laura was President of IDO Systems, Inc., a startup that developed a multiplayer platform with virtual chat, dance, and robot-fighting applications. Before that, she headed operations for the digital media R&D group for LEGO, which included the commercial production Mindstorms. Laura was the producer in charge of the first Intuit (makers of Quicken) website, editor-in-Chief of the Pricewaterhouse Coopers Technology Forecast, and instrumental in thecreation of a virtual jet-fighter location-basedentertainment system. Before moving into multimedia, Laura was an engineering consultant and analyst for organizations such as Hewlett-Packard and Xerox; and a project manager and software engineer in artificial intelligence, nuclear safeguards, and oceanographic applications. Laura received a MS in computer science at Santa Clara University .

Jon Watte, CTO Forterra Systems Inc.
Jon Watte provides technical direction to the Forterra Systems engineering team. Prior to joining Forterra Systems, Jon was Engineering Director at Be Incorporated with overall responsibility for architecture and delivery of the BeOS media, data translation, and selected kernel subsystems. Jon came to Be from Metrowerks Incorporated, where he worked on the CodeWarrior compiler tool chain for MacOS, BeOS and other targets. Prior to that, Jon worked as a Software Engineer in Stockholm, Sweden. At Baltic Business Software, he developed the external interface for data flow between third party applications and a custom database engine; this interface is now being used to develop e-commerce sites with Hansa Financials. At SCOOP AB Jon created workflow applications for pre-press and publishing. Jon attended the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Location
Pillsbury Winthrop Office Silicon Valley
2475 Hanover Street
Palo Alto, CA 94304-1114
Directions

Agenda
6:30 PM Registration and Networking
7:00 PM -8:40 PM Presentations

Price
$15 at the door for non-SDForum members
No charge for SDForum members
No registration required

Media:

Blog and media coverage:

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