Virtual Reality outfit, Sense8 Corp, is planning a renewed assault on the training and simulation market with new development tools that create 3D shared worlds. The firm, which introduced release 7 of its WorldTool Kit graphics library last week, said the library had been specially tweaked to support the 3D tools which are likely to be released at Siggraph in August. Brian Rees, sales and business director for Sense8 Europe, said the new products will let people create live moving Avatars – symbolic representations of people seated in 3D rooms. Its about shared participation in 3D, he said. Reluctant to give away too much, he confirmed that the tools would be of particular interest to people developing videoconferencing and training applications. The private company is busy taking advantage of the growing number of personal computers that have built in support for 3D graphics. Although originally designed with the development of games in mind, the Direct 3D graphics library in Microsoft’s Windows 95 can be used for other 3D things, Said Rees. Worldtool kit is a cross platform application development system that includes visual simulation/virtual reality and GUI function libraries plus end-user productivity tools. Features in Worldtool Kit 7 include support for multi-processing, multi-threading, online sensor configuration and support for new 3D graphical output devices and motion/position input sensors.