September 15, 2000 - Paris, France

Sydney2000.com chooses Virtools software to bring rich interactivity to web3D.

Sydney2000.com, the "100% unofficial site" for the Sydney Olympic games, is using Virtools technology to create virtual visits of Olympic venues and other Sydney tourist attractions. The 3D compositions offer added value web experiences that give visitors a glimpse of Olympic events. To build their 3D website components, sydney2000.com used Virtools Creation software, which allows content developers and designers to make rich interactive 3D environments with a system of behavioral building blocks.

"We decided to show the true diversity of the web and the limitless choice of technologies that can be employed. Our production shows the limitations of TV in areas where the web excels," said Adam Schmidt, the CEO of 1st Element, the web production company that created sydney2000.com. "We chose Virtools for the 3D portion because it allowed us to do what no other technology would, particularly with our time and financial constraints."

The compositions give visitors a chance to view and navigate in the physical spaces, which include the Sydney Opera House (of course!), various Olympic venues (Olympic Park Railway Station, The Dome, the Athletic Centre), Darling Harbour sites (the Chinese Gardens, Maritime Museum) just to name a few.

Sydney2000.com, which is actually a series of 15 interlinked sites, took a mere five months to develop. That's a remarkable feat, considering that in addition to doing production with typical web technologies like DHTML and Flash, 1st Element also created 3D models, shot VR photography and wrote machine code in that same five-month period. The 1st Element team, which began with four people and have just welcomed their ninth member, topped off the site with 3D interactivity using Creation software.

Before the opening ceremony, daily views of the site's main entry point have surpassed 150,000, with traffic entirely generated by word of mouth. "We are very pleased about this use of our technology," affirmed Jean-Luc Tramoy, Virtools' Business Development strategist. "This type of innovative, high profile demonstration of our production tools reflects our strategy to broaden the scope of our plugin, on the way to making it a new web standard."

In addition Web3D compositions, the site offers an event schedule, live news feeds from AFP, message boards, trivia competitions, 3D books, Olympic history, coloring books, VR panoramas, friendly betting and maps.

About Virtools
Headquartered in Paris, Virtools produces a suite of interactive 3D development tools and is swiftly earning a strong reputation for itself. Creation permits non-programmers to create rich interactivity through graphs and behavior building blocks, and Dev gives cutting edge game developers access to the underlying code for the power, flexibility and control they need to bring creative ideas to realization. The tools are used extensively by industry leaders to create games, entertainment and web 3D. Both products streamline the production process, are well adapted to episodic content, and are used by industry leaders including Havas Interactive, Microids, Hypnotix, Babel@stal, Appeal and TerraTools GmbH.

About 1st Element
1st Element is a New Media Development production company which is on the leading edge of video, cdrom, broadband, narrowband and mobile based development technologies. Specializing in fully functional e-commerce based on high end multimedia such as 3D, virtual reality and digital imaging for the mass market, we can tailor any custom ebusiness solution from project conceptualization to production to marketing, promotion and distribution with its international offices within the Asian Pacific region and beyond.

1st Element was the Australian web agency management team for Intel WebOutfitter Services and has created two sites for travel.com.au, the family and corporate travel portals.

For more information, please contact:
Shelby Ring
Virtools
+33 (0) 1 42 71 86 90
ring@virtools.com