Like the Real World Only Better

By Al Riske

16.Jan.08 - Here's the thing: Sun has a widely distributed workforce. As do a lot of companies.

Consider, for example, the team working on Project Wonderland. It's composed of engineers on opposite sides of the United States and opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Their situation is hardly unique.

Which is the point of Project Wonderland.

"The challenge is how do you encourage innovation in an environment where teams are very distributed? How do you make that better?" says Wonderland architect Paul Byrne.

The answer is a new kind of virtual world. A world that mimics the physical realm where it makes sense, but can in some cases do even better.

To start, Project Wonderland was created with business collaboration in mind.

Participants communicate by simply talking to each other's avatars, and they can work together on shared applications -- from spreadsheets to Web browsers -- in a 3-D environment.

"The high-quality audio system we have is unparalleled in the virtual world," Byrne says.

"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.

"One of the things we postulated -- and has proved to be a huge success with Wonderland -- is that after a meeting people will break up into little groups and have side meetings. Because of the immersive audio, people mill around and start side conversations and often come back and have a big group discussion again. It's natural because people do that in the real world and they don't have to think about it in the virtual. They don't have to set up a new channel. They just go over there and have a conversation, come back when they're finished."

"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."

For a large meeting that would normally take place in an auditorium, for example, no one has to have a bad seat in the back where they can barely hear and their view is obstructed.

"Everyone can be front row, center," he says.

Or, say you're having a small meeting and decide to involve a few more people. No need to find a bigger room. Just expand the one you're in.

"We can mess with reality a bit, when it makes sense."

In Wonderland, even if you join a meeting by telephone, you are still given a visual presence.

"That way, someone in-world can take you around with them and introduce you to people so you can have localized conversations."

Another possibility the team is considering: "What if I have a buddy list? Perhaps I'd like the ability to talk to my buddies no matter where they are in space. I could say, 'These people on my buddy list can always hear me at full volume no matter where I am in world and I can hear them.'"

Wondering how soon can we all start using this?

"Our community is starting to form up nicely. The goal is, in the very near future, to have in-world meetings with the community. There are a lot of people in education using it, too. Universities and schools that have set up test servers. We're still in the early stages."

Not too early to generate serious interest among businesses, however.

"There's a bank in Italy that's just done a proof of concept on Wonderland, and there's an insurance company that's been looking at doing some virtual mock-ups," Byrne says. "When an insurance company picks something up, you know you've hit the mainstream."

He 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."

That can happen in a virtual world such as Second Life, for example, but not in Wonderland where the server is in charge of everything the client gets to see -- and you control your own servers.

"One of the things we've been interested in from the word go is the model of the Web. So 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.

He describes Project Wonderland as a platform for building virtual worlds that enable collaboration of all kinds.

"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. If you want to run your own business apps you can do that in a secure way because you own the server. You can choose the business-appropriate or personal-appropriate level of the infrastructure you want to provide. Of course you can run Wonderland on your intranet as well. So you can wall it off from the public if that's appropriate."

Using Wonderland, running on top of Sun's Darkstar game server, the team has created a sample world called MPK20 "just to show what we're trying to do."

"The goal," Byrne says, "is to make it possible for anyone to extend the system in ways we haven't conceived of yet. We have more of a business focus. There a lots of other people with some funky ideas we'd love to see implemented."

And as banks, schools, insurance companies, and other organizations create and deploy their own virtual worlds, Sun intends to be right there providing the best real-world systems and services.