We’ve been busy!

• The website has had a facelift. Today we’re looking nice and clean and web-two-point-oh-ey. It’s a work in progress, and comments are very welcome.

• The 3D Demo has had an update. See if it works for you. If it doesn’t work (or doesn’t look very good, or throws an exception and eats you), let us know. Try throwing objects around, manipulating media, and opening a door. And try double-clicking on any movable objects to jump around the space. There are a couple of “Easter eggs” in the room as well.

• Behind the scenes, the “real” application has hit another milestone. We’re now previewing most of the core 3D multimedia functions in active beta (at varying levels of completion), and sampling a handful of animated 3D characters from the next phase. We’re also allowing 3D spaces to be shared and embedded in other places. You might see a handful of them around. Do sign up to join in…

• We’ve moved! Not virtually, but in real life. We’ve found ourselves in a beautiful, spacious, lively new facility with lots of space and jacuzzis and DJs. But maybe the jacuzzis and DJs are virtual. :)

• We’ve got some interesting new faces on the team. We’ll persuade them to introduce themselves here in the next few weeks. For the moment, they’re all whiling away the hours looking agile.

More soon.

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.

(Part … well, we’ve lost count of Roman numerals, but it’s the next part in our continuing series of team profiles: Leap In’s Art Engineer, whose avatar binds our tongues with the challenging name “Schmayekol”. As you’ll discover, he’s a duality wrapped in two likeable personalities…)

Hello fellow cyberspace explorer, glad you came to visit.

I suppose writing that last sentence that I use the term cyberspace not simply to invoke 80’s nostalgia for William Gibson’s works (although I am a fan of that for some reason) but rather because the Internet has become something much more then a connection of networked computers.

Art brain: They don’t want to hear that…

Engineer brain: But it is interesting… packet switching over networks of networks routing data…

Art brain: They came here to have a good time, let me take over for a while…