TITANIC LEAP FOR VIRTUAL WORLDS

NORTEL's web.alive is now hosting a MellaniuM environment which not only contains models with well over one million polygons but also supports anti-aliasing for superbly rendered immersive quality and can accomodate 300 concurrent avatars. With just one click on http://ec3v3.projectchainsaw.com/ you can be walking around this trial domed environment. There have been innumerable calls for and announcements about virtual worlds to support the importation of meshes, which allows for development of truly realistic and architecturally accurate environments. NORTEL's web.alive is a web-browser embedded client which is based on the UNREAL 2.5 platform and is capable of dealing with models generated with static meshes in the millions of polygons. So the ultimate question which must be addressed now is not whether a virtual world platform can import meshes but is it capable of dealing with large numbers of high polygon models needed to create a rich, detailed space.