summ( )n

According to Toby Coop, head of the company, Digital Skin is ready to start a commercial use of its brand-new tool, virtual environment platform for business collaboration and ‘serious games’ development. I wrote about this tool earlier in February, and already published a few print-screens, but now I have of those, and also a marketing presentation about the tool on the SlideShare – How can you use virtual worlds to drive organisational collaboration and performance.

The slides still deceptively look very Second-Life-ish, and the suite from Digital Skin can indeed be gameplay-neutral (as in the case of SL); but the main value is a game engine that allows the developers to quickly design and implement a wide variety of ‘serious games’. These games can be used to both enact real-life situations and create new possible (or impossible) scenarios. All these available options make the use of the platform very wide, from a plain meeting and communication space, to collaborative environments, to training and simulations, and up to the rapid scenario development.

Summ()n is the first in a queue to try this tool, and develop our own ‘playing rooms’ in this environment. I wrote earlier about another initiative we participated, a toolkit open design, which is a nice idea but it has a MS suite as a technology platform, which would simply incomparable with the opportunities that can be provided by the Digital Skin. I am now waiting for a ‘sandbox’ of some sort, where we can start developing our games, now in virtual environments (we have at least two ideas that can go there right away).

PS: As a bonus, I was glad to see that Toby used one of the pictures I took at one of the business gatherings we attended; need to say that it’s a ‘real meeting’ yet; thanks to the Digital Skin team we will hopefully have even more crowded online meetings soon.