Today I started to play around with Project Wonderland (weblog) because it’s in my eyes one of the most promising projects in the realm of future intraverses. It’s a open source project from Sun, which has been build upon different components (like the Project Darkstar) which already existed before and it has all in all a very nice system architecture.

Why is Project Wonderland worth a look?

Right now I am running a Project Wonderland environment on my iMac to make my first steps and to learn more about it. And that’s already one of the biggest advantages: you can set up your own environments! You can run an environment on your laptop or even on your own servers within your company (behind your firewall), to have a secure and much more controlled environment.

Of course a lot of aspects - you are typically looking for, when you think about virtual worlds as collaborative environments - are already covered by virtual worlds like Second Life (and IBM already showed, that they can run Second Life servers behind their firewall - so you can expect that to change in the long run), but maybe take a look at the video I have posted above to see the very nice integration of sharing applications within Project Wonderland.

They are working here of course with Open Office (what wouldn’t be a big barrier for me) - therefore Java based application - but that’s really one of the great advantages of Project Wonderland and it’s for me the biggest reason, why I invest time working with this platform. You can easily work together in this virtual world right from the start!

Next steps: doing events within a Project Wonderland environment

The next steps for me will be to set up a public server and to start doing some experimental events with Project Wonderland, like we did it two years ago with Second Life and the Corecon Convention Center.

Maybe the Webmonday will be again a good platform to get some geeks and virtual worlds enthusiasts from Germany together to get a few events started and to make some first experiences. As always I will of course publish everything we do here on the blog to share my experiences and findings regarding Project Wonderland.