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Project Wonderland: First Impressions, Looking Forward to More Meetings

Friday Jun 13, 2008

In my efforts to work on the Selling Business Value Community I have investigated a lot of options. I have been in Second Life, had the training by the Sun mentors, attended presentations by Sun execs, and I also sat in on a number of sessions during the big event Sun had in Second Life. Whilst I have to say I'm very impressed with Sun's efforts with regards to Second Life, I am a little bit concerned about the open structure of Second Life, I need something with a bit more security for my internal community.

During my browsing I encountered more information regarding Project Wonderland, I found some articles in the press, one featuring Nicole Yankelovich. I reached out to her, and she pointed me to Michel Denis in France, who has set up a Project Wonderland server in EMEA. And I was able to connect for the first time today, so here are some first impressions:

Graphics are a lot less fancy than Second Life, makes sense as Project Wonderland is geared towards the business community
Audio works perfectly, I was able to talk to Michel Denis, albeit with some technical challenges which were apparently on the server end
Conference room looks magnificent
Ability to open an Open Office spreadsheet, Firefox browser and other applications to be viewed and shared is awesome. It's like WebEx, but then in a virtual conference room
More importantly, it's within SWAN, so no risk of non-Sun people flying into the room which don't belong there

All in all I have to say I'm pretty impressed at this. This technology is something which I will be very actively promoting in my team, and I hope to have a first test meeting very soon. Going forward I am convinced that Sun will enhance the capabilities, improve stability, so that in 12-18 months time all our meetings will take place in Project Wonderland. Who knows, if the team members like it as much as I do, that might be a lot sooner!

Some questions to try to open a debate:

Have you been into a Project Wonderland environment? Or Second Life?
What are your impressions?
How do you see this technology evolving, what impact do you forecast it will have on the way you operate within Sun?

[3] Comments

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Posted at 03:53PM Jun 13, 2008 by Marc Dierens in Community
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I was interested to read how Wonderland is progressing within Sun, since it is being trialled by a diverse set of companies now. Sadly, I haven't had hands-on with it, but I think it offers great hope for "behind the firewall" collaboration. The ability to share documents and webpages is something that is important for business users, but Second Life cannot yet handle.

The less-than-impressive graphics is a drawback. SL is not particularly sophisticated, graphically - yet improvements in its graphics have made the experience ever more immersive and complete. However, I would expect the complexity of Wonderland graphics to increase rapidly, once all the basic glitches in the solution have been ironed out.

Hopefully, you will be able to work better with geographically diverse teams - and reduce costs too. That's what "3D intranet" virtual collaboration environments should do for you as a minimum.

Posted by Aleister Kronos on June 13, 2008 at 04:35 PM CEST #

We have been working with the Project Wonderland team. The roadmap for the platform and the underlying technologies make it a real competitor in the marketplace.

Posted by Thom Theriault on June 13, 2008 at 07:00 PM CEST #

It's good to hear that your first experience with Wonderland was positive. With our 0.5 release, we're expecting to have dramatic improvements in the graphics, both in terms of the objects and the avatars. Please continue to provide feedback on what's working for your team and what improvements you would like to see.