Real-world Organizations Try Virtual-world Technology
Several global corporations are now conducting virtual world proof-of-concept (POC) work with Project Wonderland technologies, and early results have been very positive.

Green Phosphor LLC is using Project Wonderland technology to create a new kind of business intelligence product that makes it possible to visualize data warehouse information in 3D.

Glasshouse by Green Phosphor showing dynamically generated 3D graphics

"Our goal is that the data warehouse and the ERP system will no longer be black boxes to management," said Ben Lindquist, CEO of Green Phosphor. "We want to make it simple to understand the true significance of all that data without the interpretation or 'spin' of specialists—just by pointing and clicking." For example, said Mr. Lindquist, NFL data could be presented in a 3D spreadsheet so that people could see at a glance which teams had the best running game over a period of years. For additional detail, the user could zoom in on a particular team or year—say the Chicago Bears in 1998—and see results by games or individual players. In the business world, this technology could be used by a CFO to quickly identify which products or departments of employee groups contributed most to revenue goals by year. "Project Wonderland has some important capabilities that other virtual world platforms did not have," said Mr. Lindquist. "We were impressed with the performance, the multi-client communication capabilities; we're very happy with the Voice-Over-IP features—being able to call a real cell phone from a virtual world, for example—and we like the fact that it's all Java, a platform we're very comfortable working in."

Malden Labs, based in Syracuse, New York, is using Project Wonderland technologies to bring the richness of 3D content to a whole new generation of enterprise applications. For example, an entire oil refinery—with its maze of pipelines, facilities, and systems—could be represented by 3D objects in a virtual world. This would allow a broad range of employees to do real work and solve real problems using virtual technology. Engineers and scientists could experiment with new designs or troubleshoot problems from their desktops; for example they could access detailed technical information about a failed pump simply by clicking on its virtual representation. Business planners could test multiple options for facilities consolidation or relocation in minutes rather than months. Executives could quickly get the big picture of business and technical risks, compliance issues, and financial results. "We're focused on solving real problems for real clients," said Malden Labs founder Mike Wetzer. "Project Wonderland opens up new opportunities for improving the performance of high-value, highly capitalized projects. It gets beyond the technical limitations of other virtual-world technology and it's a platform with very sophisticated and comprehensive capabilities. We're extremely excited about it and our clients are equally excited."

In addition, one of the largest members of the European banking group, with headquarters in Italy, asked Sun for assistance with a POC involving Project Wonderland. The customer's aim is to test social networking to enhance internal communication and collaboration. "We're running the POC using the MPK20 solution," reports Emilio Botti, Financial Services District Sales Manager for Sun Italy. "The customer appreciates the ability to easily share documents and applications, the high-fidelity audio, and the openness of the architecture we're proposing."

Educational institutions are also very interested in Project Wonderland. Sun has created the Sun Immersion Special Interest Group (SIG), directed by Kevin Roebuck, and many immersive education projects are now underway. For example, the University of Oregon and Merlot have joined forces with Sun to create a 3D collaborative experience for sharing academic content; and Sun and the Center for Learning Innovation (part of the Department of Education and Training, a government agency in Australia) have teamed up to explore virtual world platforms to product high-quality learning resources.

According to a recent report from Forrester Research, "....within five years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for work as the Web is today. Information and knowledge management professionals should begin to investigate and experiment with virtual worlds. Use them to try to replicate the experience of working physically alongside others; allow people to work with and share digital 3-D models of physical or theoretical objects; and make remote training and counseling more realistic by incorporating nonverbal communication into same-time, different-place interactions." (source: Forrester Research, Getting Real Work Done in Virtual Worlds, by Erica Driver and Paul Jackson, January 7, 2008)

Building on Proven Technologies
Sun Labs researchers are also looking at ways to increase the usability, reliability and scalability of the architecture, incorporating a variety of proven technologies that had their roots at Sun:

• Project Darkstar: Darkstar technology provides a scalable, persistent software infrastructure for building massively scalable virtual worlds. It gives Project Wonderland the ability to run on large servers and support massive user bases, and it greatly simplifies coding for multi-threaded environments. Essentially, Project Darkstar technology creates the illusion that the code for the server side of the application is running on a single machine in a single thread—when in fact it is taking full advantage of the inherent parallelism of the environment. "We provide the developer with a very simple model that makes it look like they're developing mono-threaded, event-driven code, but we make it parallelize," said Jeff Kesselman, Chief Architect on Project Darkstar.

• jVoiceBridge software Written entirely in the Java programming language, the voice bridge handles Voice over IP (VoIP) audio communication and mixing for tasks such as conference calls, voice chat, speech detection, and audio for 3D virtual environments. It supports a range of voice qualities from telephone to CD-quality. In addition, the voice bridge supports stereo audio and the ability for each individual connected to the bridge to have their own private voice mix. "We originally created the voice bridge for basic audio conferencing," explains jVoiceBridge Architect Joe Provino. "For the virtual world, we had to enhance the software so that each individual hears the audio from their unique point of view in the world."

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