realXtend Association has an open members meeting on the coming Monday the 12th at 13:00 EET. In Oulu in the center and also on-line if people from elsewhere want to join!

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University of Oulu’s realXtend Tundra & Webtundra based VirtualOulu environment was presented and analyzed at Web3D 2016, presented in late July in Anaheim, California. Article is in open access at ACM: VirtualOulu: collaborative, immersive and extensible 3D city model on the web

VirtualOulu has been in testing for long already, is hosted on Meshmoon and features Jonne Nauha’s early stab from a couple of years ago on kd-tree based scalable scene management, with prioritized asset loading etc. The test for measurements in the article is this walk from the market square to the cultural center near town hall:

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realXtend is making it’s way into city planning processes.

The city of Oulu organized a seminar about 3D models in city planning (Finnish) on 16th March 2016 with a hall full of participants from architect companies & technology providers working with point clouds and other 3D models.

Timo Mukari presented how the city provides 3D models automatically from the official city databases. Jere Klami explored the possibilities with 3D models in participatory city planning. Tommi Hollström presented the MAPGETS application platform — based on realXtend’s WebTundra — which features automated generation of 3D cities from map and building databases. Toni Alatalo described Playsign‘s approach to utilize lessons from games to bring action structures on top of the models and showed the Playsign product for publishing city and building plans as game-like mobile and web apps.

Toni Alatalo / Playsign on game-like action structures for engaging people in city planning

The technologies are getting on-board to be actually utilized for city services and planning — stay tuned for updates we’ll post when actual end user applications come online!

A good example of realXtend and Meshmoon in academic research: http://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/4/2/837

Since the release of the first generation of realXtend technology in 2008 the number of applications created by the main development companies as well as people all over the world has grown continuously and today we have a rather comprehensive collection of realXtend-based worlds and apps for many different kinds of uses. This post details some of them while also assessing the usefulness of virtual reality technologies for various purposes – understanding how technology can be applied for maximum benefit is one of the more valuable things we have learned during the years of development work.

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Base technologies from realXtend, including the WebTundra HTML5 client, the Tundra server, and geographical information servers (POI, GIS), are now included in EU’s catalog of so-called generic enablers for future internet application development. Today, the EU FI initiative is launching an open call for app developers: a whopping >80M euros is there for startup businesses.

The launch for that app / web service dev funding is at the ECFI event in Munich, from Tue to Thu, and I’ll be demoing WebTundra and giving introductory workshops etc. there. There’s also a round of bootcamps coming around Europe in the coming weeks where our folks from Adminotech, Cyberlightning, Playsign and our German partners from DFKI will be coaching our 3d Web and related backend service tools.

For more info see the funding call at ECFI and WebTundra and other entries in the FIWARE catalog. Let’s start making good use of the technologies which are nice and mature now, largely thanks to WebGL and other browser efforts during the past years and the three.js graphics library — the time is now, with plenty of money available to help get started!

Experience the Meshmoon 3D spaces now in your web browser – no plug-ins or installations needed – with the new WebRocket 1.0. Other news include meshmoon.com facelift, Rocket 2.5.3 release, and more! Read more here: http://eepurl.com/NDCwz

Quite some news: http://blog.cloudparty.com/2014/01/24/a-sunset-for-cloud-party/

They provide Collada export so people can get their worlds / content.

Perhaps they can move to realXtend? This is a perfect example of downsides of proprietary techs, owned by a single company which can just get shut down like that. On open source, anyone and many hosting providers can run the worlds so this would not happen.

We are finally releasing Web client next week, WebTundra made with WebSockets + WebGL — like CloudParty is too — and WebSocket server integrated to Tundra. And friendly Meshmoon hosting, similar to Cloud Party but using realXtend, will feature 1.0 production quality integrated web client.

Interesting times! Also of course intriguing to see what Yahoo will do. But that will also be proprietary and closed, probably takes time too. Who knows perhaps interoperability etc. will be possible also with them eventually etc, with web and possible upcoming vw / 3d internet standards?