Wonderblog

Yesterday marked another important milestone for Wonderland 0.5 as we advance the technology from the neolithic "teapot" age to the avatar-rich bronze age. As you may recall, the Sun Labs team made a New Year's resolution to use Wonderland 0.5 for all our team meetings. Yesterday's meeting, using an early instance of what will become the Dev3 release, was our first with avatars:

As is fitting for this stage in the project's development, we held our meeting immersed in the age-appropriate architecture of Stonehenge, an attractive model found in the Google 3D Warehouse. There's still some work to do in streamlining the import process, but in the near future it should be effortless to import a .kmz model (the Collada-based format used for Google Earth) into Wonderland.

Like the rest of the system, the avatars are still evolving. The recessive trait of walking in place that we thought was eliminated from the Wonderland avatar species in the 0.4 stone age, has re-appeared (apparently Paul was feeling nostalgic for the old days!). We're hoping that by the time Dev3 is released, natural selection will once again weed out this disturbing trait as well as the avatars without legs:

In this particular version, all the avatars are randomly selected for each user, so each user sees a completely different set. Here's a scene from Jordan's point of view:

Nice prehistoric hairdo Jordan! Another thing to notice is the stripped shirts. These demonstrate a useful new feature of the avatar system which will eventually allow two-tone color customization of avatar clothing.