ReactionGrid Inc: Growth and Change in 2013

Growth and Change always happen together. For something to evolve and flourish, it must grow.

And you cannot have growth without change.

ReactionGrid Inc. is growing and changing. Over the past year you've seen us shift away from Opensim to focus on developing our own proprietary web and mobile-based Jibe platform. You've also seen us evolve into a production studio that provides custom development services for educational 3d simulations using Jibe and Unity3d.

In 2013, you will see us continue to grow. We're working to expand our in-house videogame and instructional design expertise so our team can create the highest quality custom learning simulations. We're enhancing many of Jibe's core features to make it the most compelling multiuser 3d simulation environment out there, with the ability to coordinate complex data flow between virtual and physical world devices. And we are starting some major new projects with clients who are exploring amazing opportunities in the areas of immersive education and deeply engaging learning.

Along with all this change comes changes in leadership. Chris Hart has left her position as CTO to pursue her own ventures in data visualization, and she has handed over her lead developer role to Matthew Bertrand. Matt's been working with ReactionGrid for several months now, and we're very excited for him to take on this new challenge. Chris will remain an active contributor on the Jibe Unity Google Group in case anyone wants to pick her brains about all things Jibe.

At the helm of ReactionGrid, we're very excited to have Robin Donnelly now leading the company as President and COO. Robin's years of management and business development experience will be a great asset during this new phase of ReactionGrid's evolution. And lastly, Kyle Gomboy has left ReactionGrid to pursue his own projects. We wish him the best of luck.

We've got a great core team moving forward (see our updated About Us page), and we'll be continuing to expand our expertise while exploring how to integrate virtual worlds with some fascinating emerging technologies.

Keep an eye on this blog. We plan to surprise you in many wonderful new ways.

-The ReactionGrid Team

Jibe 1.5 and Unity 4

Over the past months we've been busy working on several development projects for clients, and in each project we have had the chance to expand on our Jibe platform. The upcoming release of Jibe 1.5 will incorporate many of the features we have developed, and we will be ensuring that the release will be 100% compatible with the newly released Unity 4 editor.

Planned features for Jibe 1.5 include:

• Room variable support
• Photon 3 & Photon Cloud support
• Improved avatar pipeline to enable wider range of custom avatars
• Reduced requirement for naming conventions for avatar outfits when customizing appearance options
• Animations can have any name, and are mapped to known animation states via a simple script set up in the Inspector (makes it much easier to grab animations from places like the Mixamo store to add simple gestures to your avatars)
• Appearance maps can support model, hair and outfit choices out of the box, the goal is to move towards a more extensible system
• Storage and retrieval of avatar dressing choices for Jibe Mars customers for future implementation of immediate login of pre-dressed avatars.
• Simplified networking scripts for position updates of objects
• Recategorized Jibe scripts in Unity hierarchy for clearer organization
• Increased flexibility on login process
• Change from three scripts (ChooseAvatar, DressingRoom, SingleSceneConfiguration) for choosing avatars and logging in, to one single simplified script (JibeLogin)
• Combine Loader and Dressing room concepts into a Login scene where you can choose all outfit choices on login. 
• Or you can change which scene is the first in the build order and log in directly to the main scene where the activity will take place
• Dedicated dressing room can be reached from any other scene in the build and should return you to the last known location
• Extra sample scripts for more common functionality (such as taking screenshots from inworld)
• Spatial audio support for Vivox voice on web player builds
• Chat history plus ability to chat from the webpage (removing the need to have the chat textbox on screen all the time while inworld)
• Single player mode for offline testing - extremely useful for debugging while not connected, or for doing a demo from behind a tight firewall
• Improved event tracking scripts for capturing additional information about user interactions
• Improved tracking of Account UUID (Unique Identifier for a logged in user) for use within websites where tracking by known ID is important. This feature enables both understanding of the current ID of the player from the multiplayer server perspective and from a user-maintained system.
• 100% C# codebase with final scripts converted from Javascript.
• Updated Jibe manual with full information on each of the new features in the platform!

We've also updated our Jibe Web Suite for our hosted and behind firewall server customers to include a rich administration site and support for groups and role based permissions to give you more control over access to your Jibe worlds. We're rolling this out to all our existing clients (it is compatible with 1.4.2 as well as 1.5) - let us know if you would like to apply for a priority upgrade by dropping us a note to our ticket system at http://metaverseheroes.com

Jibe 1.5 will be coming out as soon as we finish our QA testing. In the meantime, customers who are eager to try out Unity 4 should do so with caution until we can isolate any potential issues with the new editor and have approved the use and support of the new editor, and any issues that the pioneers of you may find please contribute your findings to our Jibe-Unity Google Group! If there are any significant issues with Jibe 1.4.2 and Unity 4 we will provide updated project kits to customers as soon as we can.