Icarus Studios News

CARY, NORTH CAROLINA - Icarus Studios, a comprehensive resource center for builders of 3D virtual worlds, MMOGs, and simulation projects, has announced the release of its next generation platform and suite of middleware tools. Nearly six years in the making, the Icarus platform represents one of the largest investments to date in a 3D virtual world platform.

"Icarus Studios has created the only suite of tools designed from scratch specifically as an integrated 3rd party environment for 3D online world creation," says Jim Hettinger, CEO of Icarus Studios. "We're launching our technology suite today after an 18-month stealth period during which our 65-person team completed our six-year development and QA testing efforts."

Built by a team of industry veterans, the Icarus suite was designed to meet the specific needs of next-generation Virtual Worlds supporting functionality such as user generated content, in-world social and entertainment activities, diverse revenue models, and in-world profiled marketing on a secure and scaleable platform.

"Regardless of whether you are building a MMO, simulator, collaborative or social environment, using the Icarus Developer Tool Suite will allow most of your project to be completed by nonprogrammer staff, and reduce time to market by an estimated 50% and development cost by 65%," says Icarus EVP, David Gardner. "Most importantly, the suite includes hundreds of features that represent the 'polishing' that so often gets left out of a final product as deadlines rapidly approach."

The Icarus platform incorporates a number of best of breed technologies such as Vivox(R) for VoIP, Ageia for its physics engine PhysX(TM), IDV for SpeedTree(R), and OC3 for avatar speech and facial expressions.

"When people see what our tools can produce for the first time they are really blown away by the level of realism and our ability to integrate with the web and real world," continues Jim Hettinger. "Our goal is to blur the lines between the real world and virtual worlds with features such as integrated working browsers, dial-out to real world phones, and real-time video streaming. We have taken everything to the next level including the network architecture where our servers have the ability to dynamically re-task themselves based on user demand, allowing us to offer a massively scalable solution."

The Icarus platform has been licensed by two unnamed clients covered by NDAs, and is being used by MMOG Fallen Earth(TM), now in development.

For more information visit http://www.icarusstudios.com.

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ABOUT ICARUS STUDIOS

Icarus Studios is a technology company dedicated to helping clients build virtual worlds, MMOGs, simulators, and 3D educational products. Our unique, next generation technology makes Icarus a comprehensive resource center for anyone tasked with quickly creating virtual space. From complete project development to platform and tools licensing, Icarus works with each client's time and budget to accomplish objectives in a fraction of historical development times. With an average of over fifteen years of experience building online worlds, Icarus technical and design leadership delivers consistent quality. Icarus today employs over 65 professionals who are passionate about their industry and the quality of their work.

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Fallen Earth is a trademark of Fallen Earth, LLC. Vivox is a trademark of Vivox, Inc. PhysX is a trademark of Ageia. SpeedTree is a registered trademark of IDV, Inc.

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