Graphics & Performance in our 3D worlds
Almost all “virtual worlds” lack the rich beauty that we’ve come to expect from 21st-century visual effects, and we believe this is one reason why more people don’t play in 3D worlds.
Many of them look (and taste?) like cardboard. For instance, we don’t feel that Second Life’s Welcome Island seems like somewhere you’d enjoy a vacation, or an adventure, or a dance. (What exactly are you supposed to do there?)
Recent personal computers are perfectly capable of delivering a richer, live, immersive, and interactive 3D experience over the Web. They just need someone (that’s us and you!) to create a 3D world to make them sing.
We’ve been at this for the past year, trying to balance graphical quality against accessibility and performance. This post is about what hardware you need to see Just Leap In at its best.
To push the boundaries of what’s possible in a web-delivered 3D World, you’re going to need a fairly modern computer. This doesn’t mean that you need the absolute latest, fastest, meanest, game playing machine out there (wouldn’t hurt). But it probably means if your machine is older than 2-3 years, it may not have what it takes for you to enjoy our Just Leap In world at its best (though we encourage you to try it out: you may find your hardware to be perfectly acceptable, and we’d like to hear how it works).
Our world requires fairly high-powered machines. We could pursue a lower common denominator, but doing so would mean you, the Explorer, wouldn’t experience the visually rich world we know we can bring to life.
The bottom line: if your computer is a few years young, belonging to the 2004 era or later, our 3D spaces should look beautiful (at least in the eye of the beholder). If your computer was already “old” a couple of years ago, you’ll still be able to explore our universe. But it won’t be as pretty – there will be fewer visual effects, as our engine will ‘fall back’ to simpler rendering techniques.
As we get more data, we’ll be describing detailed specs on our webpage. We need to gain more real world feedback from our beta testers, so we can be precise and give better advice. Whatever your hardware is, let us know how we perform for you. We would really appreciate your feedback as a beta tester.
