Thoughts On Engage Expo 2009

The third annual Virtual Worlds Expo (now called Engage Expo) wrapped up this week in NYC and I was able to make it there both days to network and moderate a panel on “Music in 3D”.

The topic on many people’s minds was the fact that the conference was about half the size of last year’s event. Many I spoke to were quick to blame the much smaller showing on the economy, however it was largely due to a conscious decision by organizers to break the event up into two separate conferences.

While Engage Expo’s focus has turned to youth entertainment virtual worlds, the new TLC 3D conference being held in D.C. in April will represent training, learning, and collaboration applications for education, government and enterprise.

With all of the core virtual world innovation being moved to a separate conference, the Engage event will need to cast a wider net in the youth entertainment space to grow next year. Fully dropping the notion of virtual worlds from the theme and reframing it as a “kids websites” or “interactive for kids” conference may just do the trick. It would be great to see companies like Miniclip, Childnet, and KidZui round out the ecosystem.

As for technology being exhibited, most companies were showing off less immersive, browser-based solutions geared towards the casual and impatient youth audience. While most were browser plugins, there were quite a few “thick” client systems on display including ActiveWorlds, Kaneva, and Project Blue Mars.

The guys from Yogurt impressed me again this year with a new version of their Adobe Flash-based rendering system.

Last year, Cemil and his team were showing off an early version of their technology that combined a 3D avatar system with a single 2D background image for each room. It looked like an isometric virtual world but with true 3D avatars.

For this year’s show, they replaced Papervision3D, the same underlying 3D library used by iLemon and Electric Sheep, with their own custom system. Their 3D system, which they say is at least a year ahead of Papervision3D, removes the bottlenecks inherent in other systems with rendering animations and asset load times. They also dealt with the limited camera control found in other Flash platforms by using a series of rendered 2D backgrounds that change with movement, giving a convincing illusion of 3D space.

I was also excited to see ElectroTank announce at the conference that they had implemented Unity3D support in their Universe Platform. Unity is an impressive full 3D engine that can run in a web browser, Windows/Mac, Nintendo Wii or iPhone/iPod Touch that I have been a fan of for quite some time. Up until now the only multi-user server capable of integrating with Unity was Smartfox Server, which lacks much of the pre-built functionality found in the ElectroTank platform.