Wonderblog

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.