Forterra Systems

Forterra Systems
Information
Industry	Virtual worlds, simulation and training software
Founded	1998 (as There, Inc.)
Founder	Will Harvey
Headquarters	San Mateo, California, United States
Notable Personnel	David Rolston (CEO), Robert Gehorsam (President), Michael Macedonia (VP and General Manager, Forterra Federal Systems), Jon Watte (CTO)
Products	OLIVE (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment)
Website	http://www.forterrainc.com

Forterra Systems (Forterra Systems Inc.) was an American software company in San Mateo, California, that built private, networked 3D virtual worlds for military, intelligence, medical, corporate and education customers. It began in 1998 as There, Inc., the developer of the consumer virtual world There, took the Forterra name in 2004 and handed the consumer service to Makena Technologies in April 2005. Its main product was OLIVE (On-Line Interactive Virtual Environment), a client-server platform in which users at ordinary PCs appeared as animated avatars, talked over spatialized voice chat and trained or met together in shared 3D environments.

OLIVE was a collaborative virtual environment used mainly for training. The company described its U.S. government contracts as work on "advanced virtual reality training applications", and its projects included an Army asymmetric-warfare trainer and, with Stanford University, a virtual environment for training medical first responders for mass-casualty events. In February 2010 Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) bought the OLIVE product line, including its names, trademarks and licenses, and hired about a dozen Forterra employees.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Checked every claim against the cited archived Forterra press releases and pages, IEEE Spectrum, Government Executive, Military & Aerospace Electronics, Washington Technology, socalTECH, Hypergrid Business, Game Developer and the VED II paper's Crossref record. About review dates.

History

There, Inc. (1998-2004)

Game developer Will Harvey founded There in 1998 to build a virtual world for online socializing. According to a 2005 Game Developer profile, he left in early 2003 after the company began concentrating on military simulation software as a defense contractor; he went on to found IMVU. The consumer service There launched in October 2003.

A 2004 company page said the firm had invested more than 40 million US dollars in a distributed virtual world platform able to host "many thousands of simultaneous users", and that the same technology behind There was being used to build a training system for the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM). The company changed its name from There to Forterra in 2004 to reflect its wider focus on virtual world technology for consumer, business and government uses.

Split from There.com (2005)

On 20 April 2005 Makena Technologies, a new company led by former eBay executive Michael Wilson, announced that it had acquired the exclusive license to There and the management of its community from Forterra. Steve Victorino, who had been There's interim CEO and then Forterra's President and COO, became Makena's President and COO. Robert Gehorsam was Forterra's CEO at the time, and Wilson stayed on Forterra's board. The announcement described Forterra as having offices in San Mateo and New York City and "multiple contracts to develop advanced virtual reality training applications for the US Government". From then on Makena ran There as a consumer service, while Forterra built virtual worlds for defense, government, academic and enterprise organizations.

Growth as a private virtual world vendor (2007-2009)

Forterra released OLIVE 1.0 as a software development kit on 1 June 2007. The company called it the 11th release of an architecture dating back to 2004 and the first aimed at third-party developers; it shipped with more than 1,000 run-time 3D assets such as buildings, vehicles and avatars. Forterra stated that more than 50 million US dollars had been invested in the OLIVE architecture by then.

On 9 August 2007 the company created a National Security Division in Orlando, Florida, headed by Michael Macedonia, the former director of the Disruptive Technology Office and former chief technology officer of the Army's Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI). On 27 September 2007 Forterra announced a strategic investment and technology development agreement with In-Q-Tel, the investment firm launched by the CIA in 1999. The work covered importing SketchUp models, a network proxy for firewalled networks, 3D conferencing with document sharing, and instant-messaging integration. Government Executive reported it as a 1.4 million US dollar deal.

In its January 2008 issue IEEE Spectrum labeled OLIVE a "winner" in its software category. The magazine described a company with offices in New York and San Mateo, led by CEO David Rolston and President Robert Gehorsam, a former Sony Online Entertainment employee, with Jon Watte as chief technology officer. In late 2008 the company listed offices in San Mateo, New York (48 Wall Street) and Orlando, with Ambient Performance in London and Xon Xoff in Sydney as its contacts for Europe and for Australia and New Zealand. Its 2008 board included Erel Margalit of JVP and Jim White of Sutter Hill Ventures, and its advisors included Wesley Clark, Jack Thorpe, and the Stanford researchers Parvati Dev and Wm. LeRoy Heinrichs.

In March 2008 Forterra and IBM signed a teaming agreement to connect OLIVE with IBM Lotus Sametime and IBM's unified communications platform, a project code-named "Babel Bridge" aimed at U.S. intelligence agencies. In February 2009 the National Training and Simulation Association gave Forterra and its partners IDSI and Rustici Software its Modeling and Simulation Cross-Function award. Forterra said the award recognized it as the first virtual world company to integrate SCORM e-learning content, work funded by the Joint ADL Co-Lab in Orlando.

Sale to SAIC (2010)

On 1 February 2010 SAIC announced that it had bought Forterra's OLIVE product line; terms were not disclosed. About 12 Forterra employees joined SAIC's Analysis, Simulations, Systems Engineering and Training business unit, led by Bev Seay. Seay said SAIC saw "virtual worlds as the direction of the future in modeling and simulation".

SAIC kept selling the platform under the OLIVE name. In May 2010 it was among the awardees of a U.S. Department of Agriculture contract with an 18 million US dollar ceiling across all awardees, for the federal Virtual Government (vGov) project to host private 3D worlds on firewalled or classified networks. At ITEC 2011 in Cologne, SAIC showed OLIVE scenarios for operating a small unmanned ground vehicle, a hospital emergency room team response and command and control.

Products

OLIVE ran on industry-standard PC hardware over networks ranging from LANs to the Internet, and Forterra said it scaled from single-user applications to environments with many thousands of concurrent users. IEEE Spectrum described its architecture as up to thousands of client PCs connected to five servers: a simulation server for real-time object interaction, a communications server that routed voice and simulation traffic, an application server for user accounts, a database server and a cluster management server. Developers customized it in C++, and the avatar system used FaceGen to generate 3D characters. Users moved with a keyboard, mouse or game controller, and a built-in session replay system recorded exercises for debriefing. Voice ran through integrated VoIP with spatialized 3D audio.

Release	Date	Notes
OLIVE 1.0	June 2007	First release offered as an SDK to third-party developers; more than 1,000 run-time 3D assets; SCORM-compliant learning management system integration and 3D record and review
OLIVE 2.2	December 2008	New collaboration and media-sharing features; integration with IBM Lotus Sametime
OLIVE 2.3	Announced September 2009, due to ship in October 2009	Pluggable user authentication (single sign-on, LDAP), web content management integration with a reference Drupal package, a custom installer, an audio tuning wizard, an API for artificial intelligence middleware, a Scenario Editor and a Media Dashboard

XR work

Military training

The Army's Simulation and Training Technology Center, part of RDECOM, chose OLIVE as the base for Asymmetric Warfare-Virtual Training Technology (AW-VTT). The system put live human role-players and semi-automated forces into realistic urban environments to train for counter-terrorism, force protection and other asymmetric and unconventional warfare missions. Forterra said a running prototype had been demonstrated to the Secretary of the Army and selected for sponsorship by the Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). Government Executive described one AW-VTT environment, a "Virtual Baghdad" replicating part of the Green Zone. According to Forterra's David Bartlett, its buildings stood where they do on the real streets but were typical rather than exact replicas.

In March 2007 Forterra finished integrating OLIVE with the Army's Dismounted Infantry Virtual After Action Review System (DIVAARS) under a September 2006 contract from the University of Central Florida, done for UCF's Institute for Simulation and Training and the U.S. Army Research Institute. OLIVE sent exercise data to DIVAARS over the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) protocol, and instructors used the DIVAARS tools to review what happened after a session. Outside the United States, SELEX Systems Integration, a Finmeccanica company, expanded its use of OLIVE in 2009 to prototype distributed training for armed forces and for secure meetings between its sites.

Medical and emergency training

With SBIR funding from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, Forterra and Stanford University's SUMMIT center built a virtual environment for training medical first responders for mass-casualty events. The work was later picked for the Army's fiscal 2008 SBIR Commercialization Pilot Program, which Forterra said could lead toward combat medic training. One result was a Virtual Emergency Department, which Forterra cited as evidence of OLIVE's value for team training. In a study published in Prehospital and Disaster Medicine in 2010, co-authored by Laura Kusumoto, whom Forterra listed in 2008 as its vice president for Forterra Studios, 10 physicians and 12 nurses treated 20 virtual victims of a radiological blast or nerve toxin exposure. Before training, 18% said they felt confident managing such incidents. Afterwards, 86% described themselves as confident or very confident.

In November 2007 the National Institutes of Health gave Forterra a contract to study game technology for training HAZMAT responders, working with Rohde & Associates and the Federation of American Scientists. Greenleaf Medical, the Palo Alto company run by Walter Greenleaf, used OLIVE to develop SECTER (Simulated Environment for Counseling, Training, Evaluation, and Rehabilitation), a multiplayer environment for treating teenagers with behavioral disorders. Forterra's case study described Greenleaf Medical as a company applying traditional VR to tele-rehabilitation and behavioral health.

See also

• Collaborative virtual environment
• Virtual world
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