Two new videos are out this week from the Immersive Education Group on the Rocket World Project with Nicole and Jon helping to show Aaron some of the new amazing new features of Wonderland v0.5 for teaching and learning.

Drag and Drop : World-building from the Desktop

Recording in-World

Our Educause Press Release went out this morning featuring our friends at the University of Zurich and their ShanghAI Lectures initiative on natural and artificial intelligence starring Project Wonderland.

A nice meeting this morning in with the great team at the University of Zurich on their new v0.5 Wonderland server world. The ShanghAI Lecture Series is a pioneering effort to bring new technology to inter-disciplinary learning to a whole new level. Things are moving along fast as they now have more than 340 students on 5 continents who will be going live in Wonderland v0.5 on 10/29 and Nov. 5th. We've got Nigel working overtime in pursuit of supporting the in-world video requirements for their sessions. You can see the cool app they wrote in the photo below that tracks users through their experience as a form of analytics and feedback for the instructors. They will also have some nice tutorials and use case scenario's to share back to the community. I'll plan to demo their environment in the Sun Booth at Educause next week in Denver.

An interesting week as several projects coalesce around the notion of setting up networked 3-D labs for conducting experiments and simulations in the sciences notably focused on undergraduate studies. In Europe, it's the LiLa Project, or Library of Labs, which has already selected Project Wonderland as the user experience virtual world platform based at the University of Stuttgart. Also in Europe at the University of Technology in Graz, researchers are heading up a similar and inter-connected initiative called CLISE to bring the same vision to life along with the pioneering efforts of MIT's i-Labs program in collaboration with the EU. In America along with MIT, the Rocket World Project takes off soon at the Immersive Education Initiative where our investment in the Alice 3.0 authoring environment and it's integration with Wonderland will provide another amazing showcase of innovation as kids design, build and launch virtual rockets while engineers from NASA supervise and mentor their work.  We'll showcase it all at Educause in Denver in a few weeks. As my friend Aaron always says, "Tally Ho!"

Now! This first test is going to be very, very basic. We'd like to see how many low-quality avatars we can get into an almost empty world. Here are the guidelines for participating:

* You should use a computer that has successfully run Wonderland in the past

* Before connecting to the test server, set your client to use one of the low-quality avatars (cartoon or toy)

* Please use headphones

* Don't do anything in the world other than open HUD windows, talk, and walk around unless asked

* Set up your environment to collect data as described in the Testing 101 tutorial: (http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javadesktop/WonderlandTesting101#Data_Collection)

* Connect to the #wonderland IRC chat channel on the server irc.freenode.net

We'll be using the Colloquy IRC client on our Macs:

http://colloquy.info/downloads.html

Keep in mind that the server will likely fail at some point. Our goal is to figure out where that point is. We'll use the IRC channel to communicate with everyone, so please be sure that you're set up to connect to that chat channel prior to the test if you'd like to participate.

Sorry for the late posting. Here's the server we'll be testing today:

http://coherent.sunlabs.com:45874/

Please remember to wear headphones. Even iPod-style ear buds will help prevent echo in the world. In addition, review the other requirements below.

Innovation does indeed happen anywhere. Check out the cool work going on in at the Chemistryt Department at University of the West Indies, Mona campus in Jamaica where they are running several Wonderland servers on to bring chemistry to life in Wonderland. Click on the avatar to learn more about their work....

It is really great to see Warren getting the kind of press he deserves for all his great work. Not only as a prototype Sun customer, but as a super person and friend. Well done Warren. Congrats. Click on his photo to learn more.

Check out Bernard's new video showing some early features on how you can  record movies in Wonderland. Should be a nice feature for capturing in-world sessions for watching later as machinima.

This week saw another very cool project launch from the Immersive Education Initiative that includes Project Wonderland and our corporate investment in support of the Alice 3.0 programming environment. We'll use Alice as an entry-level IDE for students to build and deploy rockets for test flights in the immersive worlds. Here's the announcement on Monday from the Media Grid.

Here's the new content piece for promoting Wonderland to our student communities around the world

Here's the video snapshot from the Team Marbleous entry from the Wonderland Week of Code.

Yesterday, we saw a bit of a milestone for us as we reached 1,000 members in the Sun Immersion SIG all interested in seeing the attempt to bring Project Wonderland, Project Darkstar and SunSPOT technologies together into a single open development and deployment 3-D Web platform strategy for education, business and entertainment. It was also great to see the latest project videos that Shamini posted yesterday including the Yumin Primary School Virtual Classroom and Uniquely Singapore ICT2010 worlds. I can't wait to see what they can do with v0.5.

Yumin Primary School Virtual Classroom

Uniquely Singapore

Here is the new promotional video for the Roxbury Institute of Technology, the World's First 'Immersive Education High School' where Wes and team will be using Project Wonderland and other virtual technologies to reach out to students and develop new leaders in the Boston community.

The new James Cameron 3-D epic Avatar sure looks good and the preview goes live on the net tomorrow so watch for it. It's great to see the momentum around immersive experiences these days. We're going to show some cool stuff in Wonderland v0.5 at Educause this year in Denver in the fall so come by the Sun booth or drop in on my talk at the event. The 3-D web has arrived.

This is just a quick reminder of an interview today (Tuesday, August 18th) at 4:30pm Pacific Daylight Time (US) with Howard Rheingold, the author of Smart Mobs. They'll be taking about the impact of the Internet on culture and society. http://www.conversations.net/forum/topics/howard-rheingold, or log in directly to the Elluminate session at http://tinyurl.com/convnet. The session is hosted by Steve Hargadon, Founder of Classroom 2.0 - Visit at http//www.classroom20.com/

Now that's immersive.....

This week pits Team Marble-ous against Team Timeline in the fabulous Wonderland Week of Code to demonstrate the all-new capabilities of the v0.5 platform capabilities by building two demo worlds in a week. The friendly competition is underway. I am a part of Team Timeline and even though I was bummed to miss the start of the week to fly out to DC to meet with our peers at Oracle, today I submitted my timeline idea around the Apollo Project to put a man on the moon. There's still two days to go and I've got some real work to do tomorrow, but I hope I get to see the Apollo spiral as one of the sample models at the end. I'm bringing the video camera too so I can get a quick interview and demo of the new Alice drag-and-drop integration with Wonderland. And just in time for the new movie!

Art kindly added me to the PA-SIG agenda to present on Project Wonderland and Immersive Education in Libraries. The event is set for October right here in San Francisco. It's a great community group focused on digital culture and long-term preservation of digital content. Librarians, Archivists and technologists alike. I'll share what Wonderland represents as a new medium to experience digital collections as well as some of the initiatives underway in the Library Working Group of the Immersive Education Initiative. Sign up today to join us for this very special event

When I started as a summer intern at Sun in the summer of 1984 there were a number activities of company culture that made the place a joy to be a part of including doughnut day, april fools pranks, sun t-shirts and of course the beer bust on fridays. Every friday we'd get at least a keg of beer and all the executives, top engineers and regular assembly line workers like me would come together for beer and conversation about the company. Scott would usually give a great talk and we all went home ready for the week ahead.

Now that the shareholders have voted and the DOJ clearance seems pending, I'll look forward to the last beer bust on July 30th at Great America (Thanks James for organizing!) and celebrate some of the great old times about what made Sun one of the great companies in the computer industry ever. Every good thing eventually comes to an end I suppose, but I take away a short lifetime of great memories of great people, places and events that made for a memorable experience. Thanks to Scott, Vinod, Bill and Andy for starting the company. Cheers all and best wishes and endeavors in the future.

Here are some cool YouTube videos from the Wonderland 2009 Developers Challenge held at Kasetsart University in Bangkok

The new page on Sun.com dedicated to the success story at Saint Paul College is posted. Thanks to Chuck for helping get the message out and to Warren and team for all their great work along with Robert too.

My favorite version of the new logo ideas for Wonderland

Nicole has posted the latest preview video and details for the Wonderland 0.5 dev release on the Wonderblog. The team has done an amazing job with the new graphics and avatar systems, collada support and even federation for jumping from world-to-world safely and securely. Too cool to qualify.

Meeting details for this friday's Immersive Education meeting of the Open File Format Working Group. Project Wonderland will be announced as fully compatible with COLLADA for Create Once, Experience everywhere initiative.

WHAT: OFF.TWG UPDATE AND PROJECT OVERVIEW MEETING IN-WORLD
WHEN: Friday May 15th at 11am ET (Boston time; 9-10am Pacific / SL time)
WHERE: Second Life http://slurl.com/secondlife/Smithers%20Bluff/45/204/92
AGENDA:

1 hour meeting where Open File Formats Technology Working Group (OFF.TWG)
co-chairs will provide an overview of the current status of OFF.TWG off-list
activity and progress, along with an overview of the "OFF.TWG MESH RENDERING
PROJECT" that has been under development for the past five months.

During this meeting OFF.TWG members will see screenshots of the same 3D mesh
objects in both Wonderland and realXtend, and also in the OGRE rendering engine.
The ability to render the same 3D mesh objects (models) across all three
Immersive Education virtual worlds platforms is the overarching objective
of the "OFF.TWG MESH RENDERING PROJECT" that will be discussed next Friday.

Below is the meeting agenda:

+ Welcome and meeting overview

+ Gather attendee roster [meeting roll call]

+ Brief review of OFF.TWG "3D/VR File Format Requirements" and corresponding
   "Request for Information (RFI)"

   - OFF.TWG 3D/VR File Format Requirements
     http://MediaGrid.org/groups/technology/OFF.TWG/public/out/3DVR_Requirements

   - OFF.TWG 3D/VR Request for Information (RFI)
     http://MediaGrid.org/groups/technology/OFF.TWG/public/out/3DVR_RFI


+ Responses to OFF.TWG 3D/VR Request for Information (RFI)
    - Khronos Group: COLLADA RFI response
    - Web3D Consortium: eXtensible 3D (X3D) RFI response
    - ECMA International: Universal 3D (ECMA-363) RFI response

+ Justification for proceeding with COLLADA
    - OFF.TWG members overwhelming voted for COLLADA in informal (straw) vote
    - Widespread authoring tool support
    - Already supported by one Immersive Education platform (Wonderland 0.5)
    - Ease of implementation and transformation
    - Various related projects underway for OGRE and realXtend

+ OFF.TWG MESH RENDERING PROJECT overview and status report
    - Requirement for 2 distinct implementations
    - COLLADA project overview
       + See figures in charter http://mediagrid.org/groups/technology/OFF.TWG/
       + Reference implementation via COLLADA transformation to OGRE & realXtend
       + COLLADA conformance content suite
    - Funding sources for COLLADA mesh rendering project
    - COLLADA mesh rendering project status

+ Timelines for Official Adoption and Standardization
    - COLLADA source code and related materials available to public (May/June)
    - Immersive Education OFF.TWG 3D/VR format vote and announcement (June)
    - Immersive Education file format profiles and levels [subsets] (June/July)
    - Wonderland, realXtend full support and pass conformance suite (July)
    - Croquet/Cobalt full support and pass conformance suite [TBA]

+ $10,000 COLLADA Immersive Education content creation contest
    - http://colladacontest.com
    - Contest input into OFF.TWG standardization process


+ Q/A and open discussion

+ Adjourn

Tell these kids or their parents that they aren't learning math or that video games just aren't as effective, if not more so, than a textbook. Kudos to DimensionM for helping show the way. Oh, The Times they are a Changin'.

If you'd like to win $5,000 cash then jump in to the Champion the the 3-D Web with Collada Contest. Sponsored by Intel, Khronos Group and the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative, experience designers can compete to build the most realistic fantastic online experiences using this state-of-the art file format for interactive 3-D content. And,guess what!? Project Wonderland is the ONLY Collada-compatible technology approved for the Education Grid so fire up those Blender or Maya engines and get in the game because Sun is here to help you win that dough and more. Contact us if you'd like to work on an Immersion Grant at your schoool for a student lab to get kids ready for jobs in the new world of 3-D web!

Before jumping on the Oracle Town Hall webcast, I thought I'd just quickly blog the news that JavaOne is free this year for students. And faculty? You too can get in free if you bring 10 students with you. Sign up today.

Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of Giunti Labs, will reveal the preliminary results of the Interactive Realtime Multimedia Applications on Service Oriented Infrastructures (IRMOS) Project at the 'Immersive Education Summit' - being held at the London School of Economics in London this week.

Very cool stuff and the beginning of our latest new strategic business partnership in Immersion

Paul and I met up with Henrik for a nice chat and some darn good pizza at Cafe Zoetrope last week to work out the details of our participation in Metaverse U this year. We're all set to go now for the Project Wonderland presentation and demo of the new 0.5 platform and we're really looking forward to a great event at Stanford on May 29th.