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Now with the ever growing demand for richer environment Intel is introducing a concept of meeting online in a 3D environment.
The ScienceSim will give users the capability to build their own virtual worlds. The possibilities are endless.

ScienceSim provides the basic building blocks (client viewers, installation utilities, management tools, etc.), and new technologies that enable broader interoperability through content sharing. Interested people can quickly bring up their own worlds on their own systems and experiment with creating 3D worlds of their own.” What’s interesting about this project is the amount of open source used and yet the compatibility with Second Life.

I have a few concerns regarding a new product xcelsius.  Despite impressive results there are fundamentals shortcommings that will become evident while working with the application.

• Flexibility
  • The product is designed strictly to follow a particular approach.  This methodology is quite unintuitive and requires the developer to put additional effort when designing the model.  The structure is rigid and sometimes confusing.  Most of the time it feels like you are trying to create a workaround forcing the intuitive solution in to the Xcelsius model.
• Functionality
  • Overall the product looks like a 1/2 backed solution.  It is an implementation that is driven by the components provided with the standard load [some are not sufficient in terms of what is expected from a developer's point of view].  The platform is designed to rely on Microsoft Excel but lacks capability to take advantage of basic Excel advantages [like Visual Basic enhancements], the solution is restricted to support only a handful of Microsoft Excel functions/formulas.
• Maintainability & Support [This I believe is a major issue going forward with this solution.]
  • The application has no debugger.
  • Everything is linked to a Excel cells which can have complicated formulas. IE: cell A references cell B that references C which sums cells D through E which in it self point to cell F.
  • During the training we’ve agreed that we would want to call the database to load information directly.  This would eliminate the above mentioned complicated point.  But still – the developer will be left with a BLANK spreadsheet where one would have to guess where and how the cells are referenced. In laymen’s terms: try figuring out where Matrix!$D$21:$O$21 is coming from.

Overall this is just another attempt to market Adobe’s ability to present data, an attempt that failed miserably.

In either case I am determined to get better familiarized with the things that I’ve forgotten.