News of another big player entering the virtual worlds market, with Nortel's demonstration of a new virtual worlds platform called Web Alive. It showed the technology off at an event in Ottowa, according to Zdnet's Team Think blog.
It sounds like it’s targeted at corporate users rather than consumers, and is based around a browser plug-in rather than requiring users to download a separate client.
The key feature, though, appears to be Web Alive’s use of voice. It uses a 44Khz voice codec for clearer speech, which changes in volume according to how close or far away avatars are from each other, which Team Think says “enabled clusters of individuals to have separate conversations over the same voice channel and still leave the voice understandable”.
Web Alive will apparently tie into Nortel’s other communications technologies, with features like presence applying across the board to users’ avatars and their status in other applications. Nortel hasn’t announced when Web Alive will be commercialised, but it could be within the next year or so.
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