Dana in Geeksville

Experimenting with World Creation (Project Wonderland)

As you know from many of my previous posts, I've been having a lot of fun bebopping around in Second Life, a ready-made virtual universe. To create a world of your own in Second Life, you have to pay for the use of a SIM and then build everything you need, or have it built. For those who don't want an entire SIM, you can buy or rent land, or even just a house on someone else's land. Now, I am also beginning to experiment with Sun's Project Wonderland, a toolkit for building virtual worlds.

Project Wonderland isn't a product, not a place you go like Second Life that is an established platform. Instead, Project Wonderland is an open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds, and is a 100% Java. Within those created 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.

Though Wonderland is in it's early stages and there are some clunky, undeveloped areas yet, there are some real advantages to creating worlds for yourself, your organization, or your institution. The ability to connect people via phone within the world to people without can be immensely useful. That way you can have a part of your staff inworld, while others can simply call in if they can't make it to a computer. Additionally, the sharing of files and applications while inworld is something that is difficult still in Second Life.

And, of course, the benefit of this being open source and written in Java means you can add to it as needed. Additionally, where Second Life allows you to only use the Linden scripting language, Project Wonderland makes it possible to use up to twenty different scripting languages.

Like Second Life, you can import creations from Blender, Gimp, or other applications, but in Wonderland you aren't charged per upload.

One of the really neat things about Wonderland is the fact that you can dynamically create worlds from existing Java applications. For instance, a science group did this recently. They had a 3D molecule modeling program already written in the Java programming language, and from that they dynamically created a world based on this application. I want to find out a lot more about this, exactly how it's done, and write about it for java.sun.com.

Universities are using Wonderland in a big way for immersive learning, where real world classrooms are connected to inworld classrooms, and materials can be shared. This connects people around the globe in invaluable ways and adds an extra element of fun to learning. It also stretching the reach instructors have with students.

I've downloaded Project Wonderland and am going to begin the process of world creation. It's a bit of a learning curve, and I'm used to Second Life, so it should be interesting to see how I do with this project. That said, I know of some really excellent already made examples, and I hope to get some code samples and information to write about in articles as I work my way through this learning curve.

For more information about Project Wonderland:

Project Wonderland Home Page

Wonderland Projects:

1. Virtual Northstar Project
2. MiRTLE project, UK
3. The Education Grid
4. United Nations TVET Project
5. Commonneed
6. Harding High School
7. University of Oregon
8. University of Zurich
9. Wondertown

Sun Immersive Special Interest Group

Posted at 09:55AM Oct 17, 2008 by dananourie in Virtual Worlds  |  Comments[0]