Within this context, the goal of the 3D Citizen's Plaza is to offer European Citizens a highly intuitive, easy-to-use, user-friendly, visually appealing and technologically state-of-the-art access -in their own language!- to the incredible wealth (& volume!) of information available to them on a great variety of topics that have to do with how to live, work, study, travel, conduct business etc. etc. in the different countries of the European Union.

The present project is the enriched/enhanced version of the original -Viscape-based- Citizens' Plaza (Phase I). In comparison to its earlier implementation this version features added functionality, e.g. the peripatetic News Boy, and an embedded multi-user chat space.

In all, aside from the single multi-user space, 57 different versions of the Citizen's Plaza space were produced: 3 variants (speech / textbubbles / no intro) for each of the 19 different languages of the Europe-wide target audience.

Producing all these different versions -featuring studio-recorded speech audio by native speakers in all the different European languages, as well as 'text-bubble'-versions for those users that do not have a sound card - was a huge organizational challenge.

The application features a friendly -and in our opinion not unattractive- talking female guide characters who are internally known as 'Pia' and 'Francesca'.

For the UK English version the most direct URL is:
http://citizens.EU.int/en/en/plaza.htm

But if you want to appreciate the whole context and perhaps check out one of the 3 variants in one of the 18 other languages, you could start a few levels up at: http://citizens.EU.int/ .

By the way, there is no signature nor any credits on this piece of work itself referring to us. The Commission doesn't allow it...

The Plaza -and the Citizens First 2D website- was presented to European media in a press conference organized by the European Commission. The response was most gratifying and encouraging.