Screen Shot: Forterra Systems

Playing Doctor: A simulated operating room at Stanford University Medical Center lets medical workers practice on make-believe patients.

OLIVE has its roots in There.com, a virtual-world site created by a Stanford engineer named Will Harvey and launched in 1998. In 2005, There.com spun off Forterra not to sell the virtual worlds themselves but to sell the tools with which to make them. “Rather than be a walled garden, like AOL,” says Forterra president Robert Gehorsam, “we said, ‘Let’s create a platform that works with open standards that can be used in all kinds of areas.’ ”

The idea was novel, but what really mattered was the timing. By this point, Moore’s Law and other forces had brought to the commercial world the necessary hardware capabilities, in the form of broadband, inexpensive graphics cards, and easy-to-use tools to create content. With that infrastructure in hand, OLIVE is all you need to make the magic happen.

One main difference between an OLIVE world and other virtual worlds is the OLIVE world’s “purpose-driven” intent, says Gehorsam. Rather than make the kind of free-form environment found in EverQuest (the massively multiplayer online game from Sony Online Entertainment, Gehorsam’s former employer), OLIVE’s customers want worlds that impart particular skills—like dealing with irate customers or safely disposing of bombs.

OLIVE consists of a suite of applications and tools that enable customers to build worlds accessed through PCs—up to thousands of them—that are connected through a high-speed network to five servers. The brains, called the OLIVE Core, reside on those five machines: a simulation server, which handles object simulation and interaction in real time; a communications server, which routes the simulations and communication content, such as voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP); an application server, which maintains such information as the user’s account information; a database server; and a cluster management server, to facilitate software updates.

The tools are designed for a layman. For example, you can quickly fill your world with prefabricated objects that can be customized simply by changing the associated parameters—an operating table can be elongated, a closet full of uniforms can be changed to women’s dresses. Changes appear on the monitor instantly. If you want to exert still more control over your world’s look and feel—say, how fast a virtual cougar runs in a safari simulation or how much smoke billows up from a forest fire—you can do it by making changes within the source code of the application program interface, using C++ programming language.

The designers worked hard to give OLIVE’s avatars—the computer-­generated characters—gestures and inflections that are natural enough to fully involve users in the world. A customer who wants to enhance these details can employ third-party plug-ins and software, such as FaceGen, which transforms an ordinary digital photograph into a three-dimensional character. When the users communicate with one another through microphones and headsets, they can use VoIP. The audio is spatially accurate, adjusting in volume and location in proportion to the user’s distance from the speaker.

What The Experts Say

The ultimate goal is to create a persistent avatar—that is, one that can move seamlessly through a sea of interconnected virtual worlds. A flight attendant in a virtual airline training exercise, in other words, should be able to simply and swiftly teleport to a NASA press conference on a simulated Mars. Forterra’s chief technology officer, Jon Watte, proposes a solution: connecting existing services at the back end. “There are a lot of technical hurdles to make first the avatars, and then their inventories, move between worlds,” Watte says.

One challenge is to copy information about avatars and hook that into the process of authenticating them. Another is to enable the system of one world to encode the geometry and textures of a scene into a format that makes sense to a system controlling another world. Watte says that one way to solve the problem is with Collaborative Design Activity, or COLLADA, an open standard for transferring digital assets in 3‑D environments.

To transfer an avatar’s identity from one world to another, system designers might modify OpenID, open-source software that provides identity authentication using a single sign-in solution for a number of sites. It’s already being used by AOL and Firefox, and Watte says that with a little modification it could suit an avatar’s needs too. Rolston expects to provide the ability to surf between worlds within three to five years. Meanwhile, IBM has recently announced that it, too, is working on the problem. Its partner in the effort is none other than Linden Labs, the creator of the single most popular virtual world, Second Life.

It looks as though Forterra can handle the physics, but far more important, the company seems to have figured out the customer. Michael Gartenberg, an analyst for JupiterResearch, a technology research firm based in New York City, puts the challenge in the form of two questions: “What can I do in a simulation that I can’t do in real life, and what are the implications of that?”

The answer is simple: in a simulation you can learn to drive a car without crashing, trade securities without breaking your company’s bank, manage complaining customers without alienating them, treat patients without killing them. More and more organizations are working with simulations, and whoever figures out how to provide these parties with the right tools stands to do very well indeed.

Back in the demo room in New York City, for example, the OLIVE simulation is coming to a close, and the virtual patients are now on the operating table at the simulation of the Stanford University Medical Center onscreen. “I’m going to remove the shrapnel now,” says the real nurse in Palo Alto over her headset, as her avatar slices into the pixels of the victim’s knee. If the incision goes awry, the simulated patient may lose his leg or even his life, and that wouldn’t look good, not even on the nurse’s real-world résumé. But today she makes the right moves, and the patient survives. “Great work, team,” the trainer says over the headphones.

“You can only imagine this 40 years from now,” says Forterra’s Macedonia, with a grin. “We’re all going to be living parts of our lives ‘in-world.’ ”