Sense8 Corp has opened a training centre for virtual reality professionals as part of its sales drive to establish its open architecture development tool, WorldTool Kit. The growing acceptance of virtual reality in the business world has prompted Sense8, which has until now been conducting one-day training classes at trade shows, to open the Virtual Reality Training Centre at Sense8’s headquarters in Mill Valley, California. We’ve been holding training classes for the past two years at various trade shows around the country and found them to be very popular, said Ken Pimentel, vice-president of services for Sense8. Whereas we were able to offer an introduction to virtual reality programming at those day-long seminars, our new Training Center offers more advanced three-day courses (for up to 20 people at a time) on a wider range of computers. WorldTool Kit, a cross-system virtual reality tool that has been used to construct virtual reality applications in such diverse fields as stock market analysis, business process re-engineering, manufacturing, robotics, architectural design, and biomedicine among others.
Mindset jump
The tool kit’s lack of dependence on a single system means students can choose the workstation and it obviously doesn’t do Sense8 any harm either. Ken Moore, graphical user interface business development manager at Newbury, berkshire-based Micro Focus Plc, developer of Cobol tools, is to be one of the centre’s first customers. His goal is to ensure Micro Focus’s presence in these areas and incorporate those into the tools we make, he said. Virtual reality applications are a mindset jump for his company’s customers, Moore conceded. We sell into the Fortune 1000, a very conservative base. This presents a challenge to us. I want to prove to the business world that there’s a higher level of user interface, that it’s no longer just the keyboard. At the Trainin g Center, students – from department managers who want to see VR for the first time, to programmers wanting to hone their skills – pay $1,950 for three days’ work with WorldTool Kit. In the courses, they build interactive worlds connected to various tracking systems and see the results displayed on head-mounted displays or stereo vision systems. Micro Focus and Sense8 are already working together on a Cobol version of WorldTool Kit. The virtual reality package that will run on Windows NT systems and Microsoft Windows 95 is being demonstrated to more than 1,200 Cobol programmers at this month’s Micro Focus World User Conference. I think their first response will be curious scepticism, Moore said. But then they see how this all fits into the real world business structure, and they become believers.
