Wonderblog

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).