Another collaborative environment: Project Wonderland

This is a short post on the Sun’s Project Wonderland. Citing from its home page

Project Wonderland is a 100% Java and open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. Within those worlds, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio, share live desktop applications and documents and conduct real business. Wonderland is completely extensible; developers and graphic artists can extend its functionality to create entire new worlds and new features in existing worlds.

In my recent post I’ve mentioned Second Life and Croquet: two platforms that can evolve into decent 3D visualization environments. Obviously I didn’t research the topic enough, as I’ve just found Project Wonderland. It seems to have the best of both worlds – professional team of developers, pretty flexible architecture and possibility of running your own instance of “virtual world”.

Have you spotted "Biogang" written on the whiteboard?

I didn’t play with it for a long time – current version is not very feature-rich (although it already contains video player with webcam support, PDF viewer, VNC viewer and a crude whiteboard), however the roadmap looks very interesting. I really liked extensive audio features – true stereo, sounds fade out with distance, special “cone of silence” (place where you can have a private conversation) – it proves that Sun is really trying to build an effective collaboration platform.

I haven’t seen yet much about data visualization in Wonderland – although below you can find interesting example of molecular simulation trajectory shown inside Wonderland.