The U$14 million investment of America Online (AOL) in Ubique Ltd. is
beginning to bear fruit. The new Virtual Places, announced by the AOL
last week, are providing an online environment where internet surfers
can meet, interact online and spend time in a virtual 3D place. Virtual
Places also allow content providers to create three-dimensional chat and
activity centers, for consumers, members or subscribers.
Virtual Places has been under development at Ubique since 1994 as a
World Wide Web-based open architecture."Until now, you've had to explore
the Web by yourself. Even though hundreds of people might be looking at
the same Web page, at the same time with you, ,"you'd never know it"
said Ted Leonsis, president of America Online Services Co. "Our online
community can extend the user's capability to chat and interact with
others in the Virtual Place," he added. The service is offered by GNN on
the internet and will further be extended also on AOL. The company has
also licensed VDOnet Corp VDOPhone voice conferencing technology,
recently released for VDOnet's own video conferencing uses on the net.
Currently, only voice is utilized in Virtual Places but in the future,
plans for full video are prepared. AOL has also published its
application programming interfaces so other developers might create Web
technologies for it