Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

One of the highlights at this year's NMC summer conference is seeing how the consortium is moving towards the open source immersive 3D platform created by Suns Microsystems - Project Wonderland.

On June 12th, Kevin Roebuck and Jordan Slott showed a slick demo of the yet to come Wonderland version 1.0 at the 2008 NMC summer conference. The platform seemed to be very stable and efficient. Jordan also showed us a cool 2D tool which would make the 3D world build relatively easy. Since the entire project is done in java, tools can be "easily" embedded in web pages to provide precise control of the 3D world. Another word, a true bridge between the 2D web interface and 3D metaverse can be established. It seems there has been some serious re-development of the platform we were looking at. Jmonkey engine has been introduced in the newer version of project.

On June 13th, Larry Johnson and kevin Roebuck further explained the NMC Open Virtual World project. The 2 main reasons behind the open source initiative are exactly aligned with the Arts Metaverse project here at UBC:

1) Intelectual Property ownership need to be more flexible and better facilitated;
2) Complex 3D models and precise digital reconstructions bring the true meaning of 3D metaverse in the high education communities.

These two reasons drove us to drop Second Life and stared using Open Croquet for the Arts Metaverse project. I am happy to see NMC is moving forward with this initiative. According to Larry, we should see some serious collaboration between the Wonderland development team at Suns Microsystems and NMC members in the next six months.