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IEEE Spectrum has an article on Forterra Systems’ OLIVE metaverse platform: Winner: Make Your Very Own Virtual World with OLIVE - Forterra’s OLIVE software makes the business of virtual-world environments real. The article, and the platform, are very interesting—it appears that Forterra has been spending real money to upgrade the There VR engine to a robust high performance metaverse platform (with a hefty price tag), and is beginning to make real money selling it to high profile customers as a simulation and training environment. I look forward to taking a look at OLIVE but I think that a similar platform could also be built on the open source OpenSim code—a reverse-engineered Second Life server platform. Second Life users can learn more about OLIVE this Monday, Feb 4, 2008, at 11:00 SLT (2:00 EST), Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics will host Robert Gehorsam, President of Forterra Systems Inc.

Some excerpts:

Developed by Forterra Systems of New York City and San Mateo, Calif., OLIVE creates virtual worlds for customers in health care, the military, and the media. Most of OLIVE’s applications are available by invitation only, primarily for the purpose of training staff. The U.S. National Institutes of Health is creating a world that tests industrial workers’ skills at responding to emergency disasters—think guys in hazmat suits wandering through toxic sludge like something from Doom. Retail chains use OLIVE to run employees through mock scenarios. OLIVE consists of a suite of applications and tools that enable customers to build worlds accessed through PCs --up to thousands of them-- that are connected through a high-speed network to five servers. OLIVE has its roots in There.com, a virtual-world site created by a Stanford engineer named Will Harvey and launched in 1998. In 2005, There.com spun off Forterra not to sell the virtual worlds themselves but to sell the tools with which to make them.

Investors are taking notice. Virtual Worlds Management, a tracking firm in Austin, Texas, says that technology and media firms have put more than US $1 billion into 35 virtual-world companies. Of all the fantasies that have emerged from the minds of geeks, none compares to the virtual world—a jacked-in, fully ­immersive, mind-blowing, body-rocking, computer-generated faux reality imagined in works as varied as Videodrome, The Matrix, Star Trek, Snow Crash, and the novels of Ray Bradbury and William Gibson. The virtual world offers escape from the drab responsibilities of work and home life. It also links up, at very low cost, like-minded people otherwise divided by the barriers of distance, occupation, and country. “It’s part of the grand quest of our species to bridge gaps and find more and more ways of connecting,” says Jaron Lanier, the dreadlocked scholar-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley, who is credited with coining the term virtual reality.

In August, Forterra hired Michael Macedonia, a Ph.D. in computer science who had been running the U.S. Army’s simulation, training, and instrumentation program in Orlando, Fla. He estimates that the mili­tary spends $10 billion a year on simu­lations. The simulations range from sprawling war games in the desert, with soldiers shooting laser beams instead of bullets, to one called Full Spectrum Warrior, in which players lead troops in realistic skirmishes.

OLIVE has its roots in There.com, a virtual-world site created by a Stanford engineer named Will Harvey and launched in 1998. In 2005, There.com spun off Forterra not to sell the virtual worlds themselves but to sell the tools with which to make them.

in a simulation you can learn to drive a car without crashing, trade securities without breaking your company’s bank, manage complaining customers without alienating them, treat patients without killing them. More and more organizations are working with simulations, and whoever figures out how to provide these parties with the right tools stands to do very well indeed. “You can only imagine this 40 years from now,” says Forterra’s Macedonia, with a grin. “We’re all going to be living parts of our lives ‘in-world”.