Wonderblog

We have a guest blog today from a intrepid woman at Sun who took time out of her day job in VLSI research to conduct a volunteer project using Wonderland. In only two weeks, Gilda and her colleague in Chile put together an experience that two groups of second grade children, their teachers, and a host of volunteers are not likely to forget. Here's a bit about the project in her own words.

Guest blog contributed by "Hello Buddy/Hola Amigo" project lead Gilda Garreton from Sun Microsystems:

"Wonderland with Kids" - that was the name of our talk at the JavaOne Community Corner on May 6th where we presented our experience using Wonderland with kids.

Our Wonderland project took part during Sun's World Wide Volunteer Week (WWVW) April 26th - May 4th, an event organized by Sun Global Citizenship. The project was titled "Hello Buddy/Hola Amigo." The main goal of the project was to bridge the gap in the digital divide among kids by improving their second language skills through the use of games. The project consisted of connecting two primary schools using Wonderland, one in Fremont, California and the other one in Santiago, Chile. Inside the Wonderland space, the kids in California were supposed to play a series of games like tic-tac-toe and hangman to communicate with their buddies in Chile.

Together with Juan Carlos H from Sun Chile, we originally envisioned designing our own space in Wonderland that would resemble classroom areas. Between the original plan and the actual implementation, we encountered a few issues mainly because we were not familiar with Wonderland and we had only 2 weeks to implement the entire project. Even though we didn't do all the things we planned on, it is fair to say that it was a great experience from both the users' and the developers' perspectives. We did face some challenges related to the space design, software installation and network bandwidth, but I think we still managed to create a nice environment for the kids. They had a blast with the experience and they are more than happy to try again if they get another chance!

Details about this WWVW project can be found in http://wikis.sun.com/display/HelloAmigo, including links to our pictures/videos and the JavaOne Community Corner presentation. For those curious about what "Wonderland with Kids" looked like, below are few pictures taken during the project.

     
Images Copyright 2008 by Sun Microsystems

Finally, many, many, many thanks to the Wonderland developers for their unconditional help. We wouldn't have done it without them!

Gilda
blogs.sun.com/gilda

Our second two days at JavaOne involved lots of demo'ing and a small but lively community event at the Thirsty Bear Pub. Project Wonderland was highlighted in the JavaOne Today newsletter. The article, Visiting Virtual Worlds -- Project Wonderland, provides a nice summary of Paul Byrne and Jonathan Kaplan's JavaOne technical talk.

In a previous blog posting (And the winners are...), Nigel described two competition-winning Wonderland applications created by community members. In addition to these, we were also demoing another community-created Wonderland application called ProjectVS. Our first guest blogger, Mark Loparco, has been kind enough to contribute a description of this application and share with us some of his thinking behind it.

If you have a Wonderland application or a new Wonderland feature, and would like to be a guest blogger, please let us know!

Guest blog contributed by ProjectVS team member Mark Loparco from Applied Minds:

From planning a vacation to building an enterprise software application, it seems like everything these days is a "project." As time management guru David Allen defines it, a project is simply anything that requires more than a single action. By that definition, even cleaning out the garage is a "project" (especially if on a Saturday, trust me). Regardless of the scope of the project, all projects share the same three dimensions of Time, Tasks and  Resources. In fact, the interplay of these three dimensions can often spell the difference between a project's success or failure. For example, too many Tasks and not enough Time or Resources can easily spell Disaster. Too many Resources and not enough Tasks spells thumb-twiddling and cost overruns. And too much Time -- uh, forget it, there's never too much Time.

ProjectVS was conceived to help project managers and team members better visualize the interplay of these three dimensions. Like an immersive Gantt chart, ProjectVS places team members "inside the project" by  dynamically constructing a three-dimensional collaborative "virtual space" for project team members. Written entirely in Java, ProjectVS leverages the robust client-server, telephony, avatar and 3D rendering technologies offered by Project Wonderland. In addition, because it is Java-based, ProjectVS has been able to readily leverage existing third-party Java libraries, including a library that greatly facilitated the parsing of the Microsoft Project files, saving us literally weeks of development time.

In addition to the aforementioned technologies, one of the great things about Project Wonderland is that through its innovative Wonderland File System (WFS) architecture, it affords parallel workflows for both developers and content-creators, something crucial  to the development of interactive applications. Thanks to WFS, we were able to code-lock the project a week before JavaOne while continuing to refine the models and add new content and functionality without having to touch a single line of code, including leveraging our custom Portal class (shown right) that allows you to teleport from one location in the Wonderland universe to another.

There are many possible directions we would like to take ProjectVS. A natural would be to allow users to manipulate the data from within Wonderland itself, such as adding and modifying tasks and users, filtering the users and time ranges, and even round-tripping back to Microsoft Project. We're really looking forward to continuing to work with the great Wonderland team in both the development and implementation of this amazing forward-looking tool.

 - Mark Loparco, Applied Minds

The first day of JavaOne is the exhausting one.  We arrived to finish our setup at 8am and gave demos straight through until after the pavilion closed at 8pm.  As tired as we all are, we had a great day.  Everyone we talked to was enthusiastic about Wonderland, and having third party demos (including our competition winners) in our community showcase was a great way to show off how well our community is developing.

In addition to all the demoing, we also managed to give two talks.  Nicole and Nigel described the community demos in a talk at the java.net community corner (slides).  Paul and I presented a technical session, focused on how to extend Wonderland (slides).  I've posted links to the slides here, but both sessions were also recorded.  When the recordings become available, we'll post an update.

Tomorrow we need to remember to take more pictures!  I'll leave you with this, which is one of the many printed postcards we've handed out to people interested in Wonderland.

 

The entire Wonderland team gathered at the Moscone Center in San Francisco today (it's a rare event that the entire group is in one place!) setting up for tomorrow's open of JavaOne 2008. We have two different pods: one in the Java Playground and the other in Sun booth. In the Sun pod, we'll be demoing the latest in the MPK20 world (PDF viewer, video panorama, audio and video recording, the lecture hall, the World Builder) -- see Nicole's blog post for more. And in the Playground pod, we have integrated worlds from our Wonderland Showcase competition winners Green Phosphor and Malden Labs as well as a project planning world from Applied Minds that generates collaborative spaces from a Microsoft Project database. (You can read more about our showcase winners here).

If you are at Java One, stop on by, and don't forget about all of the other Wonderland-related activities at JavaOne 2008.

We've snapped some pictures of our Java Playground pod that I've included below. But before you peruse those, have a look at a Business Week article that mentions Project Wonderland.

 

One of the intriguing things about running an open source project with a thriving community is that you never quite know what the community is actually doing with the software. Community members post questions to the discussion forums and those sometimes give us a few clues as to what they're doing, but the big picture is hard to see. So, inevitably, curiosity got the better of us, and two months ago we announced the Wonderland JavaOne Showcase Competition. We hoped it would provide an incentive for community members to tell us what they've been doing with Wonderland. Then we held our breath: what if nobody entered?

We needn't have worried, because we were surprised to discover several projects that were already quite far along. One team even invited us to join them in a demo on their own Wonderland server! The submissions we received were all of high quality and showed innovative and creative uses of the Wonderland platform. We designed Wonderland to be a great platform for building collaborative 3D virtual worlds, but these projects proved that we'd made a good start (we'll make it even better in release 0.5). Now we had a new problem. The submissions were so good, it was impossible to choose a single winner! So, after some deliberation we decided to award two first prize winners, who I'm happy to announce today.

And the winners are...

Winner #1: Malden Labs for 6thSpace

6thSpace, created by Malden Labs, is an enterprise-class application designed to manage large scale projects where distributed teams, multiple data streams, diverse application integration, and "always on" collaboration are required. Built on Sun's Project Wonderland virtual world platform, 6thSpace enables customers to simplify the way in which they access diverse content, collaborate, and utilize 3D information.

Winner #2:  Green Phosphor for Glasshouse

With Glasshouse, Green Phosphor's interactive data mining gateway application, database queries can be visualized and explored collaboratively in a 3D Wonderland environment. In this example, the user's query has produced a graph of total yardage by year and team, for the entire National Football League. The upper graph is a detailed view of San Francisco's 1998 season by player. In the lower graph Chicago's column and the 1974 row are selected. A 437 yard game by Steve Young has been highlighted. The same techniques illustrated here, along with advanced Glasshouse features, can be applied to analyzing data stored in an enterprise's data warehouse.

Congratulations Malden Labs and Green Phosphor!

If you're curious to learn more about these award winners, we'll be demonstrating them live at JavaOne in San Francisco next week. We'll have two demo stations in the JavaOne Pavilion: one in the Sun booth (#194) and one in the Java Playground (#1034). Nicole and I will also announce the competition winners at the Community Corner in the Pavilion at 1:30pm on Tuesday, May 6th.

So, come to JavaOne and get inspired! And, if you have a cool Wonderland project, come and tell us all about it. Better yet, show us!

For a list of all the Wonderland and related activities at JavaOne check the previous blog entry.

With the help of Igor Kushnirskiy, and also Kevin Rushforth, I've managed to get a prototype of Embedded Swing running inside Project Wonderland. This allows Swing lightweight components to be textured onto 3D objects.

Here is a snapshot of a working copy of part of the SwingSet2 TableDemo (with a friendly avatar nearby). But this still shot can't adequately convey the excitement I felt when I actually was able to scroll and manipulate the app! There are still some bugs and some performance issues but it is definitely another real-life validation of the Embedded Swing project. This will mean that developers will have access to Swing's 2D GUI power at their disposal when writing 2D and 3D share-aware apps in Wonderland.

Here is the link to the snapshot:

This work is currently planned to be productized in Release 0.5.

Updated: to add the image in-line.
 

I have a fascination with "dot" files. Every once in a while I look inside my home directory to see if an application I've run has created one of these files (or directories) and peek inside just for the fun of it. At times, it's come in really handy to know what's going on inside of them -- there's been plenty of times I've had to erase a "lock" file or clear a cache and couldn't quite figure out how through the application itself.

So, in that spirit, I figured I would walk through how Wonderland uses its own "dot" directory -- .wonderland/. The Wonderland client creates its own .wonderland/ directory in a user's home directory. In fact, you can have it use other directories too -- it's a Java system property that controls which (wonderland.dir property, see WonderlandConfigUtil.getWonderlandDir() for more information).

Some disclaimers first: I did not author this part of the code, so my analysis below is a deconstruction of the mechanism. So if you are in the know, feel free to make corrections by posting a comment. Also, modify the .wonderland directory at your own risk!  As this is not part of any official Wonderland specification, anything posted here is subject to change without notice.

 But, here goes...

The .wonderland/ directory essentially contains two items: a database and cache of assets and avatar configuration information. In this blog post, I'll describe the asset database and cache of assets and leave the avatar configuration information to Part II of this post.

Asset database and cache

Wonderland tracks each asset it has downloaded and cached using a DerbyDB database. The database itself is located in the AssetDB/ subdirectory (there is also a log file derby.log). To view the entries in the database, run ant run-dbtest. You should entries that look something like this:

[java] SkyBox/Back.png     http://192.18.37.42/textures            IMAGE

Each entry corresponds to a file cached within the cache/ subdirectory. The third column -- the file type -- is either IMAGE, FILE, or MODEL. All IMAGE files are stored within the cache/textures/ subdirectory, all FILE files are stored within the cache/files/ subdirectory, and all MODEL files are stored within the cache/models/ subdirectory.

The MODEL files are the 3D geometry files, in v0.3-v0.4, these are binary, gzipped Java 3D scene graphs. IMAGE files seem to encompass textures, the sky box, and slides for in-world presentations (which I guess can be thought of as textures), while FILE files seems to contain all of the .rtg files (for the avatars and animated cells). These asset types are not arbitrary strings: they are defined by the AssetType.java enumeration.

Each database record contains four entries: the asset file name (max length 120), the base URL (max length 120), the checksum (max length 40), and the asset type (MODEL, FILE, IMAGE; max length 10). The asset file name is the primary key in the database table, so it cannot be null, and it must be unique -- it is the relative path within the resource repository (and listed in the 2nd column above). The base URL (3rd column above) gives the URL of the asset repository from which the asset was loaded. In the listing above, I'm using a remote repository; using a local repository is also possible (set wonderland.useLocalArt = true).

The asset database is represented by the AssetDB.java class. Every time the client starts (or rather when an instance of the AssetDB.java class is created, that happens in AssetManager.initialize()), it checks to see whether this database exists. If so, it opens a connection to the database, if not, it creates the database. (To check whether the database exists, it only checks whether the AssetDB/ directory exists.)

Asset Manager Use of the Asset Database and Cache

Within the Wonerland client, it is only the asset manager (AssetManager.java) that makes use of the asset database. As one might expect, before fetching a resource from a repository, Wonderland first checks whether it is in its cache by querying the database for an entry matching the resource file name. If it does not find it in its local cache, it downloads the asset (either from a remote or local repository) and writes the new file to the cache and updates the database properly. When fetching the asset from the local cache, the Wonderland client makes use of the checksum for only certain types of assets: models and files, but not for images. (Also, it seems that it is only for models that Wonderland pays attention to the "ignore_checksum" flag.)

Mucking with the Asset Database and Cache

It probably goes without saying: proceed at your own risk! But it's probably worth it to talk about ways you can clear the cache in case something goes wrong. Certainly, deleting the entire .wonderland directory will clean out the cache, but that may also clean out other local state, such as your Avatar configuration, so it's probably not the best way to go. Deleting the AssetDB/ directory will likely clean out the cache, since the asset manager consults it first to find cached entries. It may be in good order to also clean out the cache/ directory as well -- but if an asset is not in the database, then the Wonderland client will assume it is not cache and rewrite over any existing file in the cache/ directory anyhow.

Simply deleting an entry in the cache/ subdirectory may cause problems -- based upon my reading of the code, if a model fails to load from the cache/ subdirectory, then the Wonderland client re-fetches it from the repository, however, for files and images, it just seems to give up and throw an exception (but I welcome corrections here).

 To be continued in Part II...

One of the great things about last week's Sun Labs Open House was getting to see most of the Wonderland team in person (also some good press). Yes we see each other in the virtual world all the time, but it's still not quite the same as face-to-face.

The question I was asking everybody was "what's up with Wonderland 0.5?" While we are in the process of stabilizing, documenting and releasing Wonderland 0.4, much of the team has moved on to the new code. Here are some of the things I learned:

We are all getting up to speed with JMonkey Engine. I've tried out some of the tutorials and built a cool racing game. Paul and Justin have teamed up to try out the Wonderland artwork in JME, imported via Collada. As the screenshot below shows, it worked. Yes it's a little dark, but I was getting over 200fps!



Meanwhile, Doug and Shawn have done a deep dive into JME. Doug told us about some of the ideas they have for the updated avatar and animation system. Like all of us, they are thinking about scalability, designing the system to render hundreds of avatars in a single space. I heard from Deron that he has been working on a number of infrastructure pieces, including an updated framework for including 2D apps in the world, the all-important picker and embedding swing components in the world. And Jordan has recently ported the WFS code to the new codebase, factored out as a module so it will be easy to use in tools like the World Builder.

As for Paul and I, we spend most of our time looking at output like this:



That is our cell bounds viewer, which we are using to debug and test the new cell and communications APIs. We are currently finalizing the APIs and working with the Darkstar team to improve the scalability of the underlying implementation. These APIs will be the first to be reviewed in the community. Look out for some more reviews (hopefully including some in-world meetings) in the near future.

With all this activity, it should be a fun summer in Wonderland!

I gave a talk today at the Sun Labs Open House on the project to develop a Mixed Reality Teaching & Learning Environment (MiRTLE). During the talk I presented the movie that we created last week when conducted an experimental installation in the International Academy at the University of Essex.

We're now recovering from all the great attention we've received during the past two days and taking a well-earned rest tomorrow...

Greetings from the Sun Labs Open House in Menlo Park, CA. We had a great day of demos.

This postcard is for Nigel who couldn't be with us here at the last minute. It shows an image of the 9-pane video panorama application that Nigel wrote. User's in the Wonderland world can reposition the live video frame, shown in the thin green rectangle, by clicking elsewhere on the panorama. When the camera pans to the new location, it leaves behind a still snapshot of the previous scene.

The Sun Wonderland team, normally distributed between Massachusetts, California, Washington State, and the UK, will be gathering in Menlo Park, CA this week for our annual Sun Labs Open House. This event is mainly for employees, but we will have some customers and press attending as well. We'll be demoing a preview of the 0.4 Wonderland release. The demo includes four virtual spaces linked together with placemarks:

• MPK20 World - in addition to showing the core features of high-fidelity audio, shared applications, and recorded demos, the new 0.4 features we'll be demoing in this space include telephone integration with the ability to carry phone users around the world, the 9-pane video panorama that works with an Axis pan-tilt-zoom camera, the audio recorder, the video recorder, and the cone-of-silence for private audio chats.

  

• Wonderland Lecture Hall - a virtual space created using the Wonderland World Builder, this space has recorded video playing at the front of the room along with a multi-user PDF Viewer that allows viewers to synchronize and unsynchronize with the presenter. In addition, the lecture hall includes two virtual microphones which amplify a speaker's voice to fill the entire room when a person steps on the white microphone pad.

  

• Music in Wonderland - this collaborative music exploration space is our first Wonderland mash-up. Album covers and music are streamed over the internet from Magnatunes.com.

  

• World Builder Playground - area where people can experiment with modifying the space using the World Builder (see Jonathan's post on March 27th for an image of the World Builder). The manager UI, which is currently needed to reload the world, runs inside the World Builder Playground space so you can rebuild the world from inside the world.

So wish us luck with the demos and accept our apologies in advance for not being too responsive on the forum for the rest of this week.

I can't resist starting with the "other news." In case you didn't see it, we got a nice mention in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

"Sun Microsystems Inc., meanwhile, has developed its own software, called Project Wonderland, and a simulated building called MPK20 that employees of the computer maker can use to collaborate.

Sun teams from around the world attend simulated meetings, at which their avatars may view presentations and videos and hold discussions. The biggest value of MPK20 is stimulating the kind of collaboration that comes from chance encounters, like those employees might have in a real hallway, says Nicole Yankelovich, who manages Sun's collaborative environment team."

Back on the topic of the conference, our focus for today's exploration of the exhibit floor was on tools, content creation, and services. We learned about a marketplace for buying and commissioning 3D models called Turbo Squid and a tool similar in concept to the Wonderland World Builder, but much more fully-featured, called SceneCaster. To address the issue of how to populate a virtual world, two vendors were selling solutions. The Masa Group had an impressive AI system for creating intelligent bots which can be used as tour guides, as "extras" to wander around a world, or as characters in a simulation. They'll work with customers to integrate these bots into any virtual world. The Metaverse Mod Squad had a very different approach to the same problem. They provide "avatar staffing" for virtual worlds. In other words, you can hire live people to populate a world to help with greeting visitors, orienting newcomers, or just providing buzz or friendly people to chat with.

In the afternoon, I was on a panel about open source virtual worlds.

The conference organizers included the panel on the schedule posted on the web site, but accidentally left it out of the printed schedule. Additionally, each of us brought videos to show, but the room had no A/V setup. Our panel organizer, Tish Shute, went above and beyond the call of duty by lugging a large-screen monitor from her home office to the conference so we could have a display to use. Notice it sitting on a chair in front of the panel table. Despite all these issues, we had a great turnout for the panel.

Other than Wonderland, the other projects represented on the panel were Qwaq, OpenSim, and realXtend, which is based on OpenSim. Perhaps not surprisingly, all the audience questions and discussion focused on OpenSim, spurred on by Philip Rosedale (former CEO of Linden Labs) who was in attendance. Remy Malan from Qwaq and I discussed after how Wonderland and Qwaq are facing a very different set of issues than OpenSim and SecondLife. The focus for our developers and users is not as much on money exchanges, marketplaces, and regulating user behavior, but much more on collaboration, accomplishing real work, data visualization, and connecting with enterprise data or information feeds from the web.

Today Nicole and I attended the first day of the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference in New York city. Even though the conference is only in a small corner of the Javits center, when everyone got together for the keynote it was clearly a big crowd (they announced over 1,500 people attending).

One of the highlights for us was the Enterprise Applications for Virtual Worlds session. The five speakers each presented demos of real-world enterprise applications using virtual worlds, for things like data center monitoring, and 3D data visualization. Ben Lindquist, from Green Phosphor gave a great demo using Wonderland to host a 3D graphing application.

In addition to attending the sessions, Nicole and I have been in back-to-back meetings during every break. It's been great to talk to so many Wonderland community members. So far, pretty much everyone we've talked to who isn't already using Wonderland has been interested in supporting it or learning more about it.

We did find a little time to explore the demo floor. Since the new avatar system is one of the major features we are looking forward to in Wonderland 0.5, we were particularly interested to talk to companies who could provide customized avatars for Wonderland. We are hoping users will be able to easily import custom avatars from platforms like Daz 3D and Evolver. Here I am getting turned into a realistic looking avatar at the CyberExtruder booth:

This year they have added an enterprise track to the conference. For those of you attending, Nicole is speaking tomorrow on a round table about open source virtual worlds at 2:30 (don't believe the schedule, it is really happening).

The Project Wonderland World Builder is coming along quite nicely. We have finally imported some full sets of artwork, and yesterday I built my first room:



This room is a lecture hall using the "collegiate" theme. The whole process was pretty simple. First, I installed the world builder in a servlet container (I used Jetty). Then I dragged and dropped the various components of the world using my browser. Finally, I saved the world from my browser and loaded up Wonderland pointing at the room that I had built. Here's how it looks in Wonderland:



The art has improved even since I took this screen shot. Overall, I was very happy with the process. In just a few minutes I was able to layout a lecture hall that we are now using in demos.

We have big plans for the world builder, and lots of improvements to make along the way. Most importantly, we want to let the artists in the community contribute themes that people like me (a programmer and definitely not an artist) can assemble into buildings and rooms. We'll be posting a tutorial soon on how to add your own themes to the world builder. Stay tuned!