We want to thank our clients and staff for the hard work done in 2011. We're looking forward to a busy and prosperous 2012 and wish the same for all. Best wishes and Happy New Year from the VastPark team!

Here's a video our team put together overviewing some of our work in 3D virtual worlds in 2011.

2012 will be full of changes for us as we focus on our professional and creative services work so we can deliver more client projects and great client-driven innovations that bring virtual worlds seamlessly into the web. More later! In the meantime, have a great start to 2012!!

Discover an upcoming highly-scalable virtual worlds platform that runs on any device with no download, no Flash and no wait time.

Orlando, FL: VastPark will be offering a sneak peek of their shiny new "VastEvents" platform at booth# 1961 at I/ITSEC 2011 next week.

Imagine instant access on any device with no download required to a virtual event for small meetings right up to massive events with thousands of avatars. That's what VastPark's team have been secretly working on. This new platform is called VastEvents. It's already working: one US client project is moving into testing phase this year. So now, VastPark's team are offering an exclusive peek to prospective clients attending I/ITSEC.

Until today virtual worlds have suffered from a technical barrier to entry: Users needed to download and install a plugin or application; each world usually took a long time to access because of the amount of data that need to be downloaded and the user experience was complicated. VastEvents is a new part of the VastPark SDK that aims to solve these problems by offering a lightweight virtual worlds experience targeting live virtual campuses, rich chat rooms and especially tuned to handle massive virtual events.

VastPark's upcoming SDK offering

The idea is already proving popular with people who have seen the new platform . "VastEvents is capturing the attention of everyone we show it to because it offers such a fast easy user experience and works inside a browser without requiring anything", says Bruce Joy, VastPark's Chairman. "There's no download, no Flash dependencies, no firewall issues, no port configuration and it scales much more affordably than traditional heavy weight virtual world offerings."

Liz Chung, VastPark's Major Projects Manager agrees. "It solves so many of the challenges that we and all virtual world providers have faced when trying to deliver into Enterprise environments. And given the initial reaction of clients who've seen it and are now organizing projects based on it, VastEvents may be the best thing we've built so far."

Viewers may be required to sign an NDA prior to seeing the demo and Mr Joy warns that I/ITSEC is likely to be the only place the team will be demonstrating VastEvents until it debuts sometime in the first half of 2012. Want to know more? Book a meeting by contacting Bruce Joy via This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . VastPark representatives will be available at Team Australia's booth# 1961 at I/ITSEC in Orlando, Florida next week.

VastPark can now run in a browser & the Mac is close to ready.

The VastPark development team have been hard at work preparing the v1.5 release for a long time now. During that time, we added a lot of new features to the product. One of the most requested was to enable our lightweight 3D worlds to run inside web browsers. We looked at a lot of approaches to this including WebGL (which we'll talk about in an upcoming blog post), other web players such as Unity and Shiva3D as well as the new versions of Flash and Sliverlight that now support hardware accelerated 3D. While we love aspects of all these projects, we knew we wanted to offer as much of the power of our open development environment and lightweight reusable component approach to interactive 3D as we could right inside any webpage.

So we've built our own web player. It's simple to install and makes it easy to embed virtual worlds in any web page.

Today we can now run VastPark worlds inside all the major browsers on the PC and we are well on the way to having it working on the Mac as well. We're officially supporting Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome on the PC and Safari, Firefox and Google Chrome on the Mac. Some of our team love the Opera browser so that's not left out in the cold either.

Let's see some preview images of our new web browser plugin at work.

We've been asked "But does this work interchangeably with the desktop version?" Absolutely! You can have users in a collaborative environment where some are using the desktop version and others are accessing it through their web browser.

The VastPark v1.5 official release is coming as soon as we've made all the changes necessary to support Mono. Contact us if you want to know the date on this release. Technical note: Mono is providing our client-side software with full platform independence from the .Net stack.

VastPark's virtual worlds platform aims to help non-game developers create virtual worlds and immersive collaboration applications. How are we doing that? We're providing a lightweight 3D interactive platform that is designed to be easy for web developers and .Net/C# developers to pick up and make absolutely new applications.

We expect to be running a Mac version inside our labs within 4 weeks. Let us know if you're keen to help us test it. We will then make the WebPlayer available to clients and then do a public release in the first quarter of 2012.

There's something magical about live events. The rush of pleasure of a complex set of tasks succeeding in real time. The scrambling to solve problems. The gut-wrenching horror if there's an insurmountable problem. It all adds up to a tremendous thrill when things work perfectly. This story is not about things working perfectly.

VastPark was happy to be asked to participate in this week's annual ACCAN National Conference dinner event by providing a virtual world environment and animated avatars for the four speakers. The event featured two senior politicians, Senator Stephen Conroy and Malcolm Turnbull MP, the inimitable Genevieve Bell, anthropologist, Director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research and supremely knowledgeable on the effects of gadgets on people's lives all over the planet and, finally, Mandy Salomon, virtual world academic, former stand-up comedian and MC for the event.

One of the challenges was that the event was occurring in Sydney, but our avatar puppeteers were in Melbourne (around 800 Kilometers away). Everyone knew that with such a limited setup time prior to the event, any Internet problems could bring our virtual world show to a halt, so there were prayers spoken and sacrifices offered to the god the Internets prior to the event. Perhaps it helped, in part.

Set up occurred on the day of the event as the ACCAN team didn't have access prior. Issue one: The VastPark world server running on the ACCAN team's laptop could not work inside the venue as the venue's IT department had failed to open the necessary ports despite assurances. No problem. Fall back plan: we used one of our US servers. Now the distance between Melbourne and Sydney grew to include a round trip to Washington, DC. Tested this option. Working well!

With technical issues solved, we ran a rehearsal where the sound was handled by Skype and everyone joined in the one Skype call. Skype was a critical part of the plan. All the speakers could be heard via Skype and the avatars could automatically lipsync to the speakers. It worked. In Sydney, the live virtual world was projecting onto the large monitors in the event hall. All was in readiness.

Show time arrived: People joined Skype call but not everyone could hear each other. The Sydney team valiantly tried several solutions to get everyone on the same call even as the event commenced, but no dice. Mandy completed her speech and was introducing Genevieve as the main speaker and still no-one in Sydney could hear Genevieve, so the Skype conference call was dropped. The Sydney team succeeded in getting Genevieve on the line and then the Sydney audience could hear her brilliantly. That left the Melbourne avatar puppeteers with no sound and no knowledge of what was occurring or who was speaking. The next few minutes were tense, but then the teams settled, coordinated via text chat and treated people to the most out-of-sync avatar acting experience of their viewing lives.

I wouldn't have guessed it, but it turns out that avatars pantomiming wildly out of synch can be very funny - at least to a Sydney audience who considered it the height of comedy. Christopher Zinn from Choice quipped "Wow, that made the Thunderbirds look like Lawrence Olivier!"

Malcolm Turnbull, Genevieve Bell and Mandy Salomon

Thanks to everyone for keeping their cool and soldiering on when lesser mortals would have panicked.

The following clips should prove what a feat it would be for the Thunderbirds to match the acting of "Larry".