USDA to deploy Virtual Worlds for Training

Acknowledging the power of Virtual Worlds, the US Agriculture Department has issued a request for offers to build a virtual world for collaboration, training, simulation, and analysis.  In particular, I like this statement:

The virtual world’s features would need to be at least as good as or better than what’s offered publicly by Second Life or World of Warcraft, according to the statement of work for the project.

The pinnacle of openness and the pinnacle of graphics beauty in MMO’s, combined.  They are looking for COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) solutions, so I suspect something like SecondLife Enterprise will be the victor.  Proposals are due later this month, and contract is to be awarded later this year with three possible extension years.

via Feds look for their avatars in 3-D — Federal Computer Week.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.