Mucha Más Vida
MuchaMasVida Nature's, Spain - June 1, 2001

Nature always amazing and of great people interest is a central theme of our next three projects. All of them are the parts of a global portal devoted to the nature. Mucha Más Vida (or Much More Life) was created to organize huge on-line community for numerous nature lovers of all ages and places of residence. Mixed educational and entertainment aspects of the portal allow a lot of activities: you can play games that required knowledge of nature questions, publish your experience regarding the nature, study different issues of Biology, Geology, Veterinary, Botanic and Gardening, etc. and many others.

The brothers Grimm captured the hearts of thousands of youngsters and their parents over decades by their fairy tales. Dreaming of such a wonderful world is fantastic, walking in such a dream world is the max. Meeting your admired hero of your favorite tale or just looking were some fairy tale characters are living is the thing every child would love to do and experience. E-spaces did the production of the Simsalagrimm worlds in multi-user virtual reality. You can travel form tale to tale accompanied by fairy characters, exploring the worlds, and playing at the same time (multi-user and single-user games). The chat box allows you to share your experiences with other visitors.

This high end VR was prepared for the F.T.I. Technoland exhibition that took place in Ghent (Belgium) at 19-25 April 1999. Since the visitors of the exhibition appreciated this virtual walkthrough through 6 cities of Flanders, it will be shown on the permanent exhibition in Technopolis. Historical centers of 6 cities were reproduced: Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Brugge, Leuven, and Hasselt. Each of them is a real-time 3D experience with full immersion in the center of the old city: square and adjacent streets. You can slide through the streets with the aid of a joystick or keyboard, exploring the picturesque old buildings. All facades, sculptures, fountains are reproduced with high fidelity, with love to the national heritage. Though so many details in the scene, the movement is smooth due to unique performance: 25 frames per second on a PII-300 with accelerator card. For the exhibition these virtual experiences were organized in a way to give the user the feeling of being really in these cities – they were shown on three 2.5x3 meters, screens (150°) placed in front of the visitor. To provide the high correspondence of models to real cities more than 2000 digital photos have been made. They were converted into more than 5500 textures to cover polygonal models. The aerial photos were used to provide exactness of the building's lay-out. A team of 12 artists and modelers worked furiously to finish all six models in 1.5 months to be in time to present it in Gent.

Virtual Europe is a 3D internet site, where people can walk and collect tailor-made information in 11 languages about their rights and opportunities in the European Union. Visitors can also get free advice from experts, and interact with other people by using virtual representations ('avatars'). This project is a part of the European Commission's permanent Dialogue with Citizens and Business which gives people user-friendly direct access -free-phone numbers, internet- to information and advice about the European Union.