Sun's Project Wonderland is a useful candidate system for facilitating collaboration among a company's far-flung employees. From the outset, Project Wonderland was planned with business collaboration in mind, according to architect Paul Byrne. Project Wonderland is a new kind of virtual world, one that mimics the physical realm when it needs to but improves on it when that's what is called for.

Project Wonderland is no simple conference call. "The high-quality audio system we have is unparalleled in the virtual world," Byrne says. Participants communicate by simply talking to each other's avatars, working as they talk on shared applications -- from spreadsheets to Web browsers -- in a 3-D environment. "We copy the physical world where it makes sense," Byrne says. "But we will break the physical metaphors where we think we can do better."

Not only is the audio in stereo, like the real world, it is also immersive, which means it gets louder as you approach, more quiet as you move away...again the real world in virtual dress.

Byrne's team has accounted for a number of aspects of the real business meeting that have been incorporated into Project Wonderland. "One thing you can't do in a video conference is have post-meeting discussions. If you have a meeting of 10 people there is no way to have two or three side conversations when the meeting breaks up. But the corridor is where innovations happens. That's where people gel the ideas," Byrne says.

The immersive quality of the audio fosters the formation of small conversational groups after the adjournment of the larger meeting. And these small groups, Byrne contends, are where the work gets done.

And, going the real world one better, "Everyone can be front row, center," according to Byrne. "We can mess with reality a bit, when it makes sense," he adds.

Wonderland even allows participation by telephone, and the ability to utilize a buddy list is also under consideration.

At the moment, with the solution's 0.3 release, up to about 20 users can become involved with a Project Wonderland session. The open source community is making use of Project Wonderland in various settings, such as universities and schools.

There is interest in both banking and insurance as well. "When an insurance company picks something up, you know you've hit the mainstream," Byrne reports.

In case you were wondering, Byrne notes that Wonderland is a platform designed to ensure secure interactions. "One of the things we baked into the platform from the word go was security. That was a huge concern for us," he says. "You can't have a business meeting and have a pig fly through the wall."

One of the reasons this doesn't happen is that, in Wonderland "...rather than having one monolithic server room with the entire Wonderland infrastructure in it, what we want is the ability to have anyone run a Wonderland server and to federate them together just like the Web is federated," Byrne explains.

"We're thinking of an interlinked Web of 3-D islands. Then people can not only produce their own content but choose their own security models," Byrne says.

At the moment, Byrne's team has Wonderland running on top of Sun's Darkstar game server where they have created a sample world called MPK20, "just to show what we're trying to do," he concludes. [...read more...]

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