OUR VISION

On the 20th of july 2010, ISN Virtual Worlds presented its solutions for the fashion industry at the IBM Forum in Milan, during an event for the fashion industry organized by IBM and the partners of the Fashion Alliance. ISN Virtual Worlds is in fact part of the Fashion Alliance by IBM, an Italian project promoted by IBM to offer innovative solutions for the fashion industry, through putting together selected partners to match the market needs with cutting edge solutions.
The Fashion Alliance is an initiative by IBM Italy and is formed by companies offering innovative solutions for fashion retail and new concept intelligent stores. These include interactive technologies for shops and virtual and augmented reality installations to enhance the shopping experience.
ISN Virtual Worlds, within the Fashion Alliance, provides solutions for online community management, virtual worlds, avatar and virtual assistants with artificial intelligence, 3D virtual shopping experiences and 3D simulation and training environments for company collaboration and internal knowledge transfer.

ISN Virtual Worlds, in partnership with Memory Dome, is proud to announce the roll-out of the Oasi Foundation Virtual World Project. As of November 2009 the work has started to produce a significant project of social impact in virtual worlds. The project consists on building an innovative communication platform and a tool for assisting disabled people and give them a new possibility to work from home and through the use of computers and virtual worlds technologies.
The project is commissioned by The Oasis Foundation, which is an Italian nonprofit organization that provides medical care and assistance to disabled and elderly people, as well as assisting patients in different types of treatments for a number of diseases. The project is managed in partneship with Memory Dome, a digital media company based in Rome. The Oasis Foundation is based in Troina, a village in Sicily, where the organization has a vast area of land dedicated to its medical and care facilities. The whole area of the Foundation is almost self sustained, farming its own land and cattle and producing a variety of dairy products. The primary mission of the Foundation is to assist the weak, in all forms and ways.

The project for the Oasis Virtual World consist in creating a number of virtual facilities where specific activities are held, to give a possibility to disabled and ill people to do an activity or work from home, through the virtual worlds technology.
ISN Virtual Worlds has planned and is currently building a space of 6 virtual islands, composing the virtual environment of the Oasis Virtual World. The environment is based on the SL Grid technology of Linden Lab and is hosted on a private estate with restricted access to the Oasis Community Members.

The virtual world of the Oasis Foundation will provide 2 main functions:

1. Act as communication and collaboration environment to inform, communicate and interact with the public in an innovative way.
2. Be a collaboration and activity platform for the disabled.

Some of the activities which will be held include:

1. Virtual Learning sessions on various topics in the Oasis Virtual University.
2. Conference and conventions in the various meeting areas of the virtual world.
3. Workshops for virtual goods production.
4. A virtual school for video production and machinima, connected to a real life TV.
5. Assistance and help sessions for families. Contact with a psychologist.
6. Exhibitions of different kinds.
7. Sessions and discussion on religious topics, cultural differences and lectures.

The staff involved in managing and running those activities is all employees or voluntary personnel from the Oasis Foundation or people from the community, assisted by ISN Virtual Worlds tutors and staff.

What is important about this project besides the goals, is that for the first time in such a project, especially in the nonprofit sector, an organization is allocating RL personnel and resources to manage ongoing virtual activities in a virtual world. Most virtual worlds projects in the past years have been sort of “left there” by companies and organizations. The main reason being the lack of resources to allocate to the management of this new channel, especially during a crisis period. That is why one of our goals within this project is to demonstrate the potential of virtual worlds, in a use case where an organization truly invests not only economic resources, but also allocates dedicated human resources full time on the project and for a long lasting period, namely 3 years.

The Oasis Foundation Virtual World will open in April 2010. Registration and access to the virtual environments will be possible through the website. A customized SL Grid viewer is also available to navigate the Oasis Virtual spaces, it will be downloadable for free from the website.
The project first phase is due to last 3 years and it will produce one of the most significant use cases in virtual worlds.

As the founder of ISN Virtual Worlds, I guess I am going to write this first post in our new company blog.

First let me spend a few words explaining why we started this blog. The answer is mainly to inform about the fast development of the technologies we work with and the availabily of new business solutions implemented by our company.

There are various blogs and news sources on Virtual Worlds and Web 3D, our intention here is not to give general news about the virtual worlds and Web 3D market, but to give visibility to our main use cases with virtual worlds and Web 3D technologies and how market innovations in our sector help us develop new solutions for our clients.

The team behind this blog is made of young professionals in the virtual worlds and Web 3D  sector, working in our company: project managers, marketing managers, interaction and strategic designers, IT managers and programmers.

We launched this blog at the end 2009 for a specific reason. The upcoming 2010 will be an important year of consolidation for virtual worlds and web 3D. After this long period of deep crisis, companies are raising their heads and we can see the first serious investments in terms of B2B applications of virtual worlds and web 3D.

As we previewed since 2007, the main applications of virtual worlds and web 3D technologies are for online collaboration and meeting and distance learning through 3D simulations. On the other hand, kids and teens 3D social networks and virtual worlds are booming and the virtual goods market is growing rapidly, especially for this target range.

Our role this year will see us implementing business solutions, through the customization of our partner’s platforms, such as the SL Grid of Linden Lab and Blue Mars of Avatar Reality. While on one hand ISN Virtual Worlds will always keep its community active and invest in the B2C side of our business and through its Virtual Italian Community in Second Life, the larger involvement of the company for 2010 will be around virtual learning projects and interactive simulations for training purposes.

3D online shopping is another application of the technolgies ISN Virtual Worlds develops. We are now able to bring the atmosphere of a 3D interactive space into a website, or create an indipendent 3D environment to recreate any condition and interaction.

For 2010 we also foresee an increase of the use our AI Avatars, artificially intelligent agents for online customer care and call centers. These versatile characters, based on the Avatar interface, can be adapted to handle various functions and they can refer for their intelligence module, to any existing knowledge base.

Performance, efficient tools, cost saving environments and green workplaces are the key words any company should keep in mind for 2010, as the new face of our online identities is taking shape around our Avatars.

I hope you will find this blog useful. Enjoy reading!

If you want to stay in touch with our activies, you can subscribe to the RSS Feed of this blog and you can join our Community here: http://www.isnvirtualworlds.com/isn/lang-en/virtualitaliancommunity

Coming soon!

ISN BLOG! A place to share news and visions about the development and the future of virtual worlds and to create a dialogue among those who think, imagine, study, work and experience 3d virtual worlds, online platforms, avatar realities, immersive environments, virtual simulations… and all the crazy things we work on everyday at ISN Virtual Worlds.