We are proud to announce our Mandarin Chinese private grid virtual world development is moving along nicely. We are developing a replica of the Forbidden City, and will be building many of the modern monuments within China. This development consists of 6 side by side islands/sims that span multiple private grid servers. The development will be used to teach the Mandarin Chinese language via distance to children throughout the world. We are proud of our progress so far and will be excited to unveil the development once we are complete. Stay tuned into our blog to see this exciting custom virtual world development continue to take shape in the future. Until then check out the detail our developers have put into the project so far.

We are proud to announce that our Lead Interactive Media Designer at Designing Digitally, Inc., Greg Wark, has won Crowd Favorite at the 2009 SIGGRAPH GameJam! 24hr character design, character modeling, character texturing, character rigging, and character animation challenge. The contest was to create a fully functional character and detailed short story within 24 straight hours from storyboard production to the entire finalized animation. They had worked straight through while distractions were presented to them to make them lose focus. Regardless of how many distractions were introduced, Greg was successfully able to develop the characters to allow his avatar to be chosen as the Crowd Favorite in the 2009 GameJam! at SIGGRAPH hosted in New Orleans. Below is a snapshot of the character built by our creative designer. Everyone here at Designing Digitally, Inc. is very proud of Greg and am very glad to have him on our development team.

To view the other award winners at the contest click here.

We receive many requests to know if we create avatars. We indeed do build avatars however, we create avatars for professional presentation or Second Life avatars for use within that VE. Below is a preview of one of our high end avatars moving around randomly for fun (medium quality so it will fit on the web). If you would like to know more about how we can make an avatar come to life for your website or ad contact us today!

So we thought since the holiday break is coming up and everyone is excited to see our java based VE platform we would go ahead and take a screen shot for all of you to see! This VE is being used via the dark-star server and other components made to interconnect so that we can provide our clients with a URL to their virtual office that they can pass out , allowing their employees to log-in and share apps, talk to each other, exchange files, etc. We are excited as this will really help us to work with those who are hesitant to implement a VE due to security reasons. Take a look at the screen shot below. Just as we showed with the other VE sim we have been doing R&D to the server which is on the left and the client is on the right. As you can see the client is running via JAVA (look at the icon on the program). Do you like my green hair?

Great news everyone! Here at Designing Digitally Inc. we have solved the biggest issue we have faced with many of our VE clients. One of the biggest problems is security. Many corporations do not want to open ports for security reasons in order to connect with the worlds currently made out there. Most educational institutions have liability issues due to students having access to other people in world and they cannot determine who exactly is behind that avatar.

Therefore our talented crew has been diligently working on a VE that will allow our clients to install the server side software on their internal server allowing them to keep the entire VE inside their firewalled network. This revolution will allow for private corporate and educational meetings without having to deal with the issues inside Second Life, and Activeworlds. It also gives full control to the client for the system by having it installed directly into their network. Did I mention it is cross platform?

 On the left you will find the server and on the right you find our client connected to the server! See below:

  For more information contact us today!

We are proud to give you guys a sneak peak of another top secret project. Our client allowed us to put some of the avatar development work we have been developing for all of you to see! The avatar below has been named Tim. No, these are not in Second Life avatars, nor are they being used in that way. These are for a 3D animation for a client. Not bad for a computer rendering huh ladies?

 Here is a ROUGH version of the talking animation.

Granted this is just a quick rapid prototype so we already know that the mouth is not exact...

That is why it is called a rapid prototype. lol