VRCO senior software engineer Todd Yocum writes up his own development work much better than I ever could, so I’ll let this post write itself:

Saw your post about Tibet and the comment about GE and Snow Crash. I’m a big Stephenson fan myself, so thought it might interest you to know that my company is probably the closest there is to having GE in a Metaverse at the moment.

We have a product called Conduit that can take a normal OpenGL app and allow it to be rendered in 3D stereo in an immersive display. This is not your normal desktop stereo, this is wall-sized display, using head tracking to give the correct perspective based on the viewers head. As an added bonus, you can also use Conduit to navigate within a 3D view of Conduit. For example, from a pulled back view of New York with the 3D buildings, you can then fly through the streets of New York using a 6DOF tracker.

We demo’ed it publicly recently at the VR2006 conference, so its not really a secret, but Conduit for Google Earth is not a product or being distributed at this time either, so not a lot of press for it. We are shipping Conduit for StudioTools, which we announced at VR2006 and also demo’ed.

Fun stuff, and it was pretty well received at VR2006 as far as demos go.

Here is the Conduit site, not a lot there visually unfortunately, mostly tech stuff.

And here is out sister site, Fakespace, which makes the killer VR displays. Not quite Snow Crash for usability yet, but probably the next best thing, depending on what your criteria is.

To which I can only add: Todd, please put up a web video of this in action.