Some new and recent announcements out of VastPark, a product in development that promises, like Areae's Metaplace, to allow users to create and connect self-generated online worlds. It held a closed test last year, and opened its forums shortly thereafter. Now word comes that it's signed an agreement with NICTA, Australia's Information and Communications Technology Research Center.

VastPark will license NICTA's distributed network engine, aimed at allowing developers to deploy and scale online worlds efficiently to a broader userbase, as opposed to the more traditional client-server method. Through the agreement, Vastpark gets access to NICTA’s engine, and NICTA gets a commercial platform to conduct a large-scale trial of its technology. Eventually, the two organizations hope that VastPark will create an in-road to commercialization for the technology.

NICTA P2P project leader Dr Santosh Kulkarni said, “This is the beginning of what we expect to be a long-term relationship with VastPark as a partner in the development and commercialisation of the virtual world technology coming out of NICTA."

At the same time as the NICTA announcement, VastPark held its first multiuser stress test for its closed beta users, during which participants explored a first person shooter game under construction using the platform. The company also announced a proprietary software tool called VastServer. The company compares it to a web server, which serves up IMML, an XML-based HTML equivalent. According to VastPark, it acts as the message relay between all the site's users so they can interact with each one another in real time.

Explained VastPark lead developer Craig Presti, "Because VastServer is so light-weight and easy to run, we’re lowering the barrier to people popping up a virtual environment that they can share briefly as a meeting room or a game environment and then stop it. It makes virtual worlds into utilities, much like Skype conversations. Of course they can run them persistently but a lot of what we, as users, do is form ad hoc events and it’s terrific if we can run rich events online whenever we want very easily."

VastPark CEO Bruce Joy added, “We see a big future in communities working together to build meta-games with the platform. That is: Lots of little game maps that join together into one massive growing game. Community gaming is going to prove very compelling and we want to make it rewarding for everyone involved."