Today, we announced another step in beefing up our web.alive platform. We're teaming up with Virtual Heroes to create new virtual 'worlds' that enterprises can use for more interactive training and collaboration.

Virtual Heroes is perhaps best known for creating the America's Army Game training platform and HumanSim, a medical training world (check out this ABC News video - it's a great example).

So, the idea here is to combine Virtual Heroes' expertise in virtual learning and training simulations (especially for healthcare, federal, and corporate training markets), and combine that with Nortel's web.alive online collaboration environment.

"In a Virtual Heroes world, textbooks and lectures are replaced with complete interactivity, excitement and serious fun!," according to Virtual Heroes' website. While that may sound a little over the top, I can tell you from first-hand experience, this web.alive technology is pretty cool stuff (co-workers and I participating in a recent demo didn't want to log off because the interaction was so... well... real).

You may recall previous posts on web.alive - its been one of our more actively-discussed projects (see 'Taking the wrapper off web.alive' and 'Nortel gets into the virtual reality game'. And earlier this year, Lenovo came on board as our first real customer (using web.alive to launch a virtual store and we announced we would license Epic Games' Unreal Engine to help drive our solution.

Keep an eye out for more to come on web.alive. In the meantime, check out this link for more info, including some neat screen shots.