You've probably heard of Sun's Project Darkstar, maybe even Wonderland, the underlying engine, and middleware apps powering the company's internal MPK20 virtual workspace. Did you know that you can now download the client and server, and run them on your own system though? No? Neither did I. After a chat with Klaatu Niu in Second Life yesterday, I spent a good deal of time exploring Project Wonderland, which you can think of as a kind of middleware application with Darkstar beneath it, and MPK20 above. Though i couldn't get it to run on my Mac (they say it can be done, but there are no precompiled binaries as of yet and it would not run for me..) I did get it running on Windows very quickly, and have to tell you, that its pretty impressive, and could well be the major game changer others hinted at earier this year.
The picture you see here to the left is my blue haired avatar running around an empty local server populated by these bots you see sitting in front of me. Here's the thing -- that clunky looking avatar may not be the most beautiful expression of personal art in the world, but it took me less than 2mins to set it up, at which point, with simple arrow key navigation, I was walking around quite happily, and had these bots been real, could have been communicating just as simply.
The 3D was very smooth, everything you could hope for. The example environment (Sun's MPK20 world) looked professional, as you can see. When you put all of that together with the ease of setup that the limits on avatar customization ensure, the GPL license, emphasis on security, and scalability as well as it's lightweight and cross platform Java based archtecture, AND the fact that you will very shortly be able to network individual servers, I think you'll see why I think Linden Lab, makers of Second Life have cause to be concerned.
Secure, Private or Public 3D Grids Are Coming
That's right, in the next version of Wonderland, you'll be able to run your own private, secure grid, or set up public ones. All you need is a bank of fairly regular web servers. It will still take some time before we start seeing any really useful non Sun run grids running Wonderland, as content creation is still firmly out of most peoples reach, needing to be imported from X3D data produced by tools like Maya or Blender, but there are plans for inworld creation tools, though no time frame is given. What really interests me here though is the question of security. Wonderland has been put together for use by Sun, and thus security has been a concern from the outset. Second Life has a woeful record on Security, and though many large tech companies operate in Second Life, none of them are confident of the systems security or stability -- If Wonderland can provide 3D working environments with secure voice chat, it could well be the kind of secure, enterprise level 3D application that eats Linden's lunch.
