For any of you who develop interactive 3D content, whether for science, art, or entertainment, there is an exciting tool that can speed your process and explore interactive possibilities without using up a huge amount of resources. Virtools SA is swiftly building a strong reputation for its Virtools suite of interactive 3D development tools. Virtools offers a cool, standalone, off-the-shelf tool for building richly interactive applications for entertainment, training, prototyping, and planning. The tool's flexibility to work in a variety of environments comes from its building-block approach to constructing interactive content. For fledgling game designers, it offers a platform to exhibit interactive design without requiring them to write code. For multimedia-development companies, it offers a tool to prototype an idea quickly and cheaply for a proof of concept. For educators, it offers a tool for delivering rich edutainment without having to be a game coder.

Virtools Dev™ is the ultimate in soft architectures. They attempt to define a complete game framework that can be used to create a quality 3D game. How successful this is will be revealed by the tests of the marketplace, but the future certainly looks promising for this sort of product.

French firm Virtools has updated its 3D interactive content development tool for the Windows environment. This new version includes an improved Web player plug-in for Internet Explorer and Netscape, better NT support, new OpenGL and sounds engines, more behaviors and new on-line documentation... The product comes in two guises. Virtools Creation is aimed at multimedia authors who want to add 3D interactive content to their applications or Web pages without having to program. Virtools Dev includes a full-blown software development kit (Virtools SDK) for the C++ developer which comes with code samples and an ActiveX player which can be used to play Virtools content in applications developed with tools such as Frontpage, Visual Basic or Visual C++.

With a bit of inspiration and a whole lot of elbow grease, a driven individual or small group could use Virtools to create something that could make money and cause gamers to think a little bit differently about themselves and the world. With all its quirks, Virtools has the overwhelming virtue of making complex technology way more accessible to the average person than it was before, and that's a good thing.