Wonderland by night

Written on February 11, 2008 by Katherine W. Prawl

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist that headline. I’ve just signed up for a developer account in Sun Microsystems’ lg3d Project Wonderland, which their website describes as a “multi-user virtual environment … to provide an environment that is robust enough in terms of security, scalability, reliability, and functionality that organizations can rely on it as a place to conduct real business.” Since I did this after midnight, the “by night” thing just popped out.

One reason I am interested in this is the next paragraph, which says, “One important goal of the project is for the environment to be completely extensible. Developers and graphic artists can extend the functionality to create entire new worlds, new features in existing worlds, or new behaviors for objects and avatars. The art path for Wonderland is also open. The eventual goal is to support content creation within the world, but in the shorter term, the goal is to support importing art from open source 3D content creation tools as well as professional 3D modeling and animation applications.” (Emphasis mine.) Well, there you go, a direct tie-in to the 3D virtual world content development software from Reallusion® I wrote about yesterday.

Another reason for my interest is pure research into collaborative virtual worlds (or “environments” if you prefer) as part of the growth of the metaverse.

So, look for more about both these projects — the environment and the tools for populating it — as this blog proceeds.

Posted in 3D, Metaverse, Software