Wondertown: Wonderland's official public server : Angad's Blog

About this blog

I am Angad Singh. I have served as the Sun Campus Ambassador of JIIT University, Noida (India) from August 2007 to July 2008 and as a Campus Ambassador Tech Lead from July 2008 to July 2009. This was my sun blog. Here I jotted down all my random scribblings, reports on all activities I conducted as CA at my university, my little projects, hacks, geeky stuff and new technology I came across, all the way to things I learnt in my exciting journey with Sun..

About Me

Technorati Authority

View blog authority

10 Recent Entries

» Goodbye..
» JavaOne 2009: Roundup
» JavaOne 2009: San Francisco Sightseeing Tour
» JavaOne 2009: The Parties and Dinners
» JavaOne 2009: James Gosling Student Q&A
» JavaOne 2009: Keynotes
» JavaOne 2009: The Conference Floor
» JavaOne 2009: The Pavilion
» JavaOne 2009: CommunityOne
» JavaOne 2009: The Prelude and the journey

Archives

« July 2009
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

Today

Links

My..

Blogs that interest me

Today's Page Hits: 583

Best Viewed in..

All

Ambassador
Java
Netbeans
OpenSolaris
OpenSource
Personal
Sun

« Screencasting on... | Main | We're throwing a... »

Saturday Aug 30, 2008

Wondertown: Wonderland's official public server

NMC and Sun's Open Virtual Worlds Project have setup a public Wonderland server to create and build a new demo world for Wonderland called "Wondertown".. what we've been waiting for is finally here!

From Kevin Roebuck, Community Manager, Immersive Technologies, Sun Microsystems:

Designed as a place to enable software developers, artists, software,
experience designers and researchers to use Wonderland, Darkstar and
SunSPOT technologies to explore the potential of virtual worlds in
different settings (Basically anything you can think of !).

We have set up a community project that shall model a 10 X 10 kilometer
Wonderland space that makes up the area for the creation of Wondertown
by it's users. To help model the world, each modeler are given a 50 x
50 meter area of the terrain where he / she can model something
(preferably some buildings etc), much the same way you can get access
to land in Second Llfe and model it to your liking.

The content creation model(s) is based on an "Open Art Path" and shall
be designed primarily with the Blender 3-D Authoring tool also
supporting Maya, Lighwave, Google Sketchup or other tools that support
and export open file formats for the COLLADA platfom and x3d. The goal
is keeping the art path as open as possible, enabling content creation
from a wide selection of tools. Also, it's important to have heavy
support for at least one loader. This will make the content production
pipeline better defined. As the model grows, so should the quality of
the content and artistry, and therefore Wonderland will become better
and more robust as a platform for educational and industry use.

We will also be make available a public library of 3d models that have
been tested for loadability into Wonderland. This is so that those who
manage to create 3d content for Wonderland (MPK20 creator) can show
others (like me) how it should be done. Preferably this will also be in
the x3d or the Collada format. Shared art assets which can can be
tagged and activated in world (for example label sliding and normal
doors) so they operate as an avatar approaches.

One of the big question in the research project with the NMC is how
tools allow users to add meta data to models and if that data appears
in the exported collada file in the same format between tools. As we
progress it would be great to have help in creating models in a variety
of tools and compare this type of information.

Also, investigating simple model and texture interchange in the short
term would be hugely beneficial. Another important area that needs
addressing in the short term is the best way to build a texture library
for the world models. If we can encourage our content creators to use
standard textures (where appropriate) it will help with download and
rendering performance.

An open source repository will house the textures in the
NMC-Wondertown-art project under some sensible directory structure ie
plants, materials etc. That way, a common Wondertown is a place where
multiple modelers can join forces to build and improve the best models.

Wondertown Site Access:

The webstart URL is http://nmc2.wonderland.commonneed.com:8080/Wonderland.

Wonderland itself lives under /opt/lg3d-wonderland and all the
documentation and wiki at http://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net applies
there. Right now it runs as root, running as a non-privileged user
results in java tracebacks (crashes). The root user is kinda
unprivileged in a container, so we may allow root access later when
people become familiar with the environment.

File uploads (if needed) can be done via SCP. Technically the whole
zone port range is accessible but it will change as we're working on
network improvements and will seal a few ports.

Join the Wondertown Project

Wondertown Forum

Go to Wondertown (Java Webstart)
http://nmc2.wonderland.commonneed.com:8080/Wonderland

Come on people, Let's build Wondertown!

Technorati: wonderland virtual-world server

Posted at 11:45AM Aug 30, 2008 by Angad Singh in OpenSource | Comments[5] |

Comments:

This looks promising, from the past wonderland seemed to be something completely oriented towards collaboration between individuals for commercial purposes, this new approach with giving content creators a space where they can build will certainly open more prospects.

Posted by virtual world watcher on August 31, 2008 at 06:17 AM IST #

Resently i have been very interested in the wonderland project, and am planning to set up and host my own to test it's usage in a school, It is a shame as the links above dont work and i would have liked to a project in action.

Posted by Sam on November 24, 2008 at 02:34 PM IST #

Is this a possibility part of the WL package now?

"The content creation model(s) is based on an "Open Art Path" and shall
be designed primarily with the Blender 3-D Authoring tool also
supporting Maya, Lighwave, Google Sketchup or other tools that support
and export open file formats for the COLLADA platfom and x3d."

Thanks...

Posted by Enzo on January 29, 2009 at 09:02 PM IST #

Yes this is very much a part of WL 0.4. Users can import 3d content into the virtual world while Wonderland is up and running from within the world.

Posted by Angad Singh on January 29, 2009 at 10:24 PM IST #

The link to wondertown doesn't seem to work. Say resource can't be found. Has this development bit the dust? If not can anyone let me know how to access WonderTown?

Cheers

nigel

Posted by Nigel Wynne on June 25, 2009 at 11:49 PM IST #