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.