Spooky, secretive, titanic US military contractor SAIC has bought out Forterra, a company that makes virtual worlds for government agencies. I sat on a panel at an SAIC event on games and public diplomacy a few years back that turned out to be filled with CIA and other spooks who wanted to know if Al Qaeda was recruiting in World of Warcraft. Wonder what they're going to do with World of Fedcraft?
This is a significant move. Forterra, while not as expansive as Second Life commercially, focused on a very specific virtual worlds niche: Closed virtual world platforms for government. So much of government, because of the attendant needs of a bureaucracy to create a sense control around information, requires closed technology systems in order to function and to create a sense of security around their many classified research and training exercises. Forterra offered that. (Second Life now offers this through their Second Life Enterprise client, focused mainly in businesses.)
SAIC Acquires Virtual World Company, Forterra Inc
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Come to Defense Gametech 2010 (http://www.teamorlando.org/gametech/) and find out for yourself what the DoD is doing with serious gaming and virtual Worlds. The OLIVE environment from Forterra is only one of the (better) examples of how virtual worlds are being used for collaborative training and meeting. The best tool that I have seen for actually getting work done an a virtual world is by a company called TelePlace (formerly Qwaq) that was recently acquired by Lockheed Martin. The Air Force is using Teleplace as a component of their MyBase online environment. Teleplace has the best potential of any technology I’ve seen to really move distance learning ahead by a giant leap.
They’re already using virtual worlds as training grounds for cross-cultural interactions and simulators for analyzing scenarios. There is nothing new or shocking here, just the military bringing the contractors in-house.
Right. Well, if you wanted to create a virtual world, tracking every citizen, how would you do it? You’d have a platform available in which you could model the country’s geography, then incorporate cellphone data, web browsing data, publicly-available information, credit / banking data for every individual. And people wonder where their taxes go. huh.
Geez, sounds like Gelernter’s Mirror Worlds are coming to pass…
As a student of SAIC, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, this article freaked me out for a second.
Common military and government workflows in Virtual Worlds often look just like the commercial ones: training, project management and operations.
However, as CEO of Teleplace, the comment that we were acquired is mistaken. We’re an independent company, and we do provide the software for the AirForce MyBase project and Lockheed is a customer of ours. However, we’d have noticed if we were acquired :-).
I agree that Teleplace is currently the best 3D VR tool for online collaboration and e-learning. But… they have not been acquired by Lockheed Martin, not that I know of at least. Source?
In the early 2000 Forterra inc. use to own There.com. But in sometime 2004 there was a black friday and a lot of people were lossing their jobs and such. Than Michael Wilson bought There.com and his company now is called Makena Technologies. However, There.com closed in March 9th, 2010. Before There closed I found out that Forterra gave the rest of the rights they had left from There and hand it over to Michael Wilson.