(November 20, 2008) VastPark, the highly interactive platform that is geared towards the easy creation of games and virtual worlds has, today, announced five new development companies to join its Developer Program.
The new companies, in order of joining, are:
• MindTaffy (US) – Veteran 3D Web developer
• Finpa (Melbourne, Australia) – Elearning results specialist
• Metaversatility (US) – Well known virtual worlds developers
• ADMINO technologies (Finland) – Expertise in virtual worlds & business solutions
• The Project Factory (Sydney, Australia and UK) – Australia's most successful Second Life development company
Bruce Joy, VastPark's CEO is delighted with the response from developers, "We are really pleased to be able to welcome Finpa and The Project Factory from Australia, ADMINO from Finland and Metaversatility and Mind Taffy from the US into our Developer Program. We're excited about working with all of our wonderful developers."
Each company accepted into the program is an expert in their field and have the experience to be able to deliver rich solutions based on working with the VastPark platform and team.
"Given VastPark is an Australian company headquartered in Melbourne, it is great that we've got some wonderful Australian developers joining us", enthused Bruce Joy.
FinPa's expertise is in elearning, with an emphasis on detailed reporting showing what each learner has achieved and the effects of programs on the learners understanding. Finpa has clients in government, education and industry specific training.
"We see the VastPark platform as a powerful, real time, collaborative learning environment. VastPark's platform enables workplace, competency based assessment and learning especially for high risk environments where real time simulation is a cost effective and educationally sound alternative," envisaged Damian O'Sullivan, CEO and Founder of FinPa.
VastPark will complement Finpa's existing excellence in Flash and enable them to offer projects that feature both Flash and immersive educational elements powered by the VastPark platform.
The Project Factory specializes in creating unique and commercially attractive virtual world presences for brands, television broadcasters, and corporate clients worldwide. They have a multidiscipline team who work across web, mobiles and virtual worlds, but their passion is for 3D interactive environments that delight, engage and tell stories.
"There are two key activities that will grow business in virtual worlds - developing innovative builds that are highly social alongside business extensibility and technical interoperability," explained Gary Hayes, Head of Virtual Worlds at The Project Factory. "We have created two of the top five brands in Second Life, BigPond and ABC which blend business with rich community and we're delighted to be associated with VastPark who are leading global development in open standards and extendable business models across virtual worlds."
ADMINO technologies have joined the VastPark Development Program because they believe that Virtual Worlds built on the VastPark platform can offer new possibilities for business users.
"We want to create a new approach to collaborate, work, communicate and share information in an inspiring and visually rich environment. VastPark brings a fresh, innovative and user friendly technology that is easy to use, deploy, manage, and therefore we consider it to be business-ready," stated Hannu Hollström, CEO and Cofounder of ADMINO technologies.
Metaversatility have helped a range of high profile clients achieve results that go beyond marketing hype and help build communities. Orange Island in Second Life is a great example of their work and shows how brands can leverage virtual worlds as a social media platform.
"Vastpark is built on great ideas, intense knowledgeability, and openness to collaboration. We dig it, and look forward to growing it even more," exclaimed Matt Daly, Metaversatility's Creative Director and Cofounder.
California-based Mind Taffy Design specializes in "client-side" 3D real-time rendered new media, which leverages the 3D hardware found in every PC and Game Console to deliver interactive, immersive 3D user experiences with smaller downloads than Flash and digital video files. The skills and experience of the Mind Taffy Design team represent a perfect fit for the VastPark development environment.
"VastPark will allow us to deliver immersive, real-time, photo-real i3D content to our Corporate Branding, Product Marketing, e-Learning and e-Signage clientele, while using only a few megabytes of 3D data and IMML programming logic," stated Wallace Jackson, CEO and Lead Digital Artisan at Mind Taffy Design. "We will also be utilizing the VastPark platform to develop virtual worlds and MMORPG websites that will be open to the public, and which will feature Functional Virtual Product Placement and In-World e-Advertisement from Mind Taffy Design's international branded manufacturer clientele."
VastPark's team is available to work closely with developers on major projects:
"We're keen to work with our developers to help them achieve their digital world project goals," said Liz Chung, VastPark's Major Projects Manager. "For anyone with a project who is either looking for recommendations to a developer or seeking to partner with us on a project, please contact us at Developer AT VastPark.com"
VastPark's team has worked on their developer documentation. "We're now about to release a software developer's kit. It includes the first complete introductory document to developing on the VastPark platform," stated Craig Presti, Lead Developer at VastPark. "Right now we're working on opening up the platform for developers so it is the perfect time for developers to start experimenting with the VastPark platform."
Openness is a recurring theme when talking about the VastPark platform.
Bruce Joy emphasized, "Our job is to make the VastPark platform an open eco-system: open specifications, open source player, and an open marketplace that supports users, developers and partners selling content, plugins and so on. It also requires that we're available to partner with developers to help them achieve critical projects. Finally and most critically we aim to build a community who can devise their own solutions and enhancements that take the platform far beyond what anyone by themselves can achieve."
The VastPark Developer Program was first announced in September and new developers are welcome to apply at any time. Go to www.vastpark.com and click on the Developers link.
About VastPark
VastPark is the company behind the VastPark platform, a light weight framework for creating rich immersive virtual world. The platform includes a full toolset that is free to download, an open markup language called IMML, a highly extensible plugin framework and open source code. VastPark offers a developer program to help developers take advantage of the platform.
Worlds powered by the VastPark platform can be built cost effectively and delivered just like websites so you can achieve security, robustness and flexibility. Come find out why geeks love our tech. To date, the benefits of VastPark have been realised by a number of universities and developers, using the platform for a variety of visualisation, remote meeting and immersive games purposes.