After Openlifegrid, SpotOn3D is next in line for Maxping inspection. We expected to encounter just-another-SL-clone, but SpotOn3D seems have much more depth and thinking under the hood.
When I visited SpotOn3D for the first time, I did not even
leave the entrance location as I spent the whole time chatting with
the CEO and founder, Tessa Kinney-Johnson. I heard a lot about how
SpotOn3D is really making sure that content creators can safely
sell their products and be sure that it is not easily copied and
pirated. Technically and theoretically it remains impossible to
make it 100% proof, but many should be happy with 99% solution.
The first visit also convinced me that they were taking users
seriously; I got to select from several ready made avatars, which
is a nice feature for virtual world beginners.
The next visit was more "productive" for writing this article as
I spent the time to visit the virtual offices. One can rent own
office building, with all the presentation tools and perfect window
views for just 25$/month. This may seem a lot when compared to
simhost.com rent of 35$ for a whole new region. But if I just want
to have meetings and I had a Real Life business to run, I didn't
want to go through the trouble to build my own virtual world
office. Not to mention the skills needed to make it look decent or
to have all the click-to-show powerpoint presentation tools
available.
I tried all the tools, it was really easy to click a photo-frame
and select a photo from my local computer and it was quickly loaded
to the frame. I accidentally selected a full resolution 10M pixel
photo, but it was resized on the fly and the experience was smooth
for everyone.
The powerpoint tool also worked well, I just got to select a ppt
file from my local computer and it was uploaded to the wall screen
at the meeting room. The previous uploads were kept for me so if I
wanted to change back to another already uploaded presentation it
was also easy to do.
Whiteboard application was experiencing a bug for me so it did
not work this time. Tessa said that they are working on that bug
and it should be fixed soon enough.
If you need to arrange larger events with more than a handful of
participants, you can rent a cloud server based meeting region.
Again it is fully equipped and built. There was even an espresso
machine for the quests - and even when this kind of things are not
really needed for efficiency of virtual worlds, they work to set
people in the right social context.
As it was already mentioned in the title, there are much more
things to write about SpotOn3D than just the meeting tools. I will
for sure visit them in the future and write about other aspects of
them.
Warmly recommended experience!
snowcrashme
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