Tuesday April 17, 2007

Sun Lab did it again. They started an incredible cool project called MPK20. In short it's SecondLife for professionals. But not to be bored by lonesome people all night long. It's more about being more effective and more successful during you daily job!

On any given day, over 50% of Sun's workforce is remote - and actually that's me included. MPK20 is a virtual 3D environment in which employees can accomplish their real work, share documents, and meet with colleagues using natural voice communication. Just like on Sun's physical Menlo Park campus, known as "MPK," inhabitants of the virtual MPK20 office building can work together in planned meetings, or can talk informally in unplanned encounters. Unlike the physical campus, however, in MPK20, community can be built and maintained without the constraints of physical location.

The goal of MPK20 is to allow users to conduct all their real work within the virtual environment so that doing private work and sharing with others can be accomplished seamlessly, without the need for a special application sharing tool. The team room and surrounding private work spaces are filled with documents and whiteboards. Team members, regardless of physical location, can maintain awareness of what their team is working on by scanning the contents of the room.

The technology is based by the way on Sun Labs' Voice Bridge, a software written in Java that 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. The Voice Bridge 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. Click on the image below to see a larger image of a poster about the Voice Bridge.

The Voice Bridge is a scalable, SIP-based platform for setting up and managing conference calls. Calls can either be entirely VoIP or combined with calls routed through a PBX. The Voice Bridge manages conferences, allowing members to join or leave the conference. It is responsible for receiving and mixing speech and sending the mix out to each member of the conference. Speech detection is done by the Voice Bridge so individual speakers can be identified easily.

Additionally, each caller can have his or her private mix of the conference. This supports a variety of features ranging from individual volume control to multiple, private voice chats within a single conference. The Voice Bridge has been in use internally at Sun since 2004 for conference calling as part of the Sun Labs' Meeting Suite prototype software.

And only "by the way": The MPK20 software is additionally built on top of the Sun's Gaming Server infrastructure, called Project Darkstar.

Isn't that REALLY cool?