Wildpockets to let marketers and game developers turn 2D photos into 3D apps

I ran across a pretty cool company last week at the 3 Rivers Venture Fair in Pittsburgh. It’s still in pre-launch, but I think it’s well worth taking a look at. The company’s called Sim Ops Studios, and its newest creation, Wildpockets, is a product that lets users convert 2D photos into embeddable 3D applications through simple drag and drop.

The company’s cofounder and CEO, Shanna Tellerman, demoed some of the potential uses for Wildpockets, from a virtual 3D shopping store, to a 3D application filled with Nike shoes (see screenshots below) that let users grab a product, spin it around, and review it from all angles.

She says the product, due to launch sometime this fall, is targeted to casual game developers as well as content creators who are active in designing their own pages and publishing content.

Wildpockets uses a video game engine downloaded as a plug-in that lets users and developers create interactive 3D applications both through drag and drop (for the non-technically savvy creator) and through simple graphical scripting (for the more active developer).

The application, which has a forerunner product on Facebook called Build and Smash, lets users go to the Wildpockets website, import 2D pictures, morph them into customizable 3D environments or use Wildpockets’ drag and drop templates, and then deploy the resulting application anywhere on the web.

The applications will all be hosted by Wildpockets, and the company also has plans to release an API for developers to build applications on top of the 3D platform, a la Flash.

While fleshing out its product, Sim Ops wants to attract creative agencies, marketers, and companies to use Wildpockets to create revenue-sharing ads and in-game ads that Wildpockets can track and provide analytics for.

The biggest challenge the company may face is convincing developers that it is a worthwhile transition from current competing 2D plug-ins such as Microsoft’s Silverlight, Adobe’s Flash/Flex technology and Sun’s Java Applets, which don’t yet offer drag and drop 3D application creation, but may quickly seek to replicate the functionality to appeal to the booming virtual world market.

Tellerman is no stranger to the 3D world. While at Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned her masters degree in Entertainment Technology, she interned with mega-game publisher Electronic Arts on The Sims 2 project and Atlas.

In fact, the technology on which Wildpockets is built is exclusively licensed from the university, and Tellerman has brought on six full-time developers all from CMU. With co-founder Wendy Armstrong, VP of Product Strategy and Maketing, the team rounds out at eight.

Founded in 2006, the company originally developed instructor-based prototype simulators for Firefighter and Emergency response teams, with products such as Hazmat Hotzone, which it created after collaborating with the New York Fire Department. It also released a pre-cursor to Wildpockets, Code3D, a 3D Scene viewing and editing technology that lets users create, customize, and share virtual 3D scenes. Code 3D is mainly used as a virtual training tool.

Sim Ops Studio has raised $1.5 million in convertible debt loans from Idea Foundry and Innovation Works, both Pittsburgh, PA-based seed funding companies.

David Adewumi, a contributing writer with VentureBeat, is the founder & CEO of http://heekya.com a social storytelling platform billed “The Wikipedia of Stories.”