Thales and Infinite Metaverse Alliance (IMA) team up to work together on the next generation collaborative and training tools

Virtual Reality, increasing connectivity and connection speed are enabling people to work better together. We are on the verge of a next generation of collaborative and training tools where virtual reality will drive  working together to be no longer time and place dependent or restricted by visual boundaries.

Frank Rulof, Business Developer working for Thales in The Netherlands, : “Our engineers of today do not remember the world started to experiment with SecondLife two decades ago. Virtual Reality will in five years be the standard in working together in a global environment. Accessibility and security are key.  It will redefine how individuals work together, how much we travel, how we will teach and learn, and how we will spend our free time. ”
Both IMA and Thales have the ambition to create an OpenSimulator based virtual world environment that facilitates communication and working together in a corporate-, government-t, educational- and industrial environment in addition to the opportunities for the general public.

We are developing an integrated virtual environment that can include a multitude of simultaneous open media from pictures, movies and powerpoints to complex 3D models, where teams of engineers can meet to discuss and develop that are continuously accessible anytime from any device. The integrated virtual environment will be accessible in the both the cloud as well as on stand-alone servers and complies with todays security standards for data exchange.

Quote IMA: “The products will have a clearly defined roadmap and the products are maintained and developed by industrial standards. By joining efforts, we will be able to do more in a shorter time and promote the usage better. The core OpenSimulator and viewer source code will stay and be open source. We hope developers will contribute to the growing community.”

OpenSimulator is an Opensource variant of the SecondLife application from Linden Labs in the US. The OpenSimulator Virtual World consists of a server side which controls the Virtual world and all its assets and a client side which encompasses a viewer which renders the virtual world based upon the VR Objects provided by the server in the scene the user is looking at.
More information will be made available as the projects move from private repositories to public repositories for community and developer participation.

About Thales

The people we all rely on to make the world go round – they rely on Thales.
Our customers come to us with big ambitions: to make life better, to keep us safer. Combining a unique diversity of expertise, talents and cultures, our architects design and deliver extraordinary high technology solutions. Solutions that make tomorrow possible, today.  From the bottom of the oceans to the depth of space and cyberspace, we help our customers think smarter and act faster - mastering ever greater complexity and every decisive moment along the way. With 65,000 employees in 56 countries, Thales reported sales of €15.8 billion in 2017.

About IMA

Infinite Metaverse Alliance (IMA) is a Research and Development Philanthropic Foundation formed in response to open source community needs for maximizing societal benefits. Our core mission is a focus on inclusive "design thinking" to advance virtual worlds, virtual reality, and synthetic environments. In IMA you have a champion to make the most of virtual worlds to meet your needs and to push the technology to meet the future as it unfolds.