The Immersive Education Initiative launched the Education Grid last Friday with the Sun Wonderland virtual-world platform hosted on four organizations’ servers.
Stan Trevena blogged about it. (That’s his snapshot at left.)
(Others have blogged about it as well.)
This is a big deal because:
O The Sun Wonderland platform is open source.
O The grid is distributed, i.e., hosted on multiple organizations’ servers.
O The Sun Wonderland platform is specifically designed for business and education. The plan is that everyday desktop applications can be used in-world, assets can be imported in, and so forth.
The platform is still in very early stages of development.
But this is a big milestone in the virtual-worlds space.
Workplace Learning Today
Subscribe by Email
Follow Tom on Twitter
Connect on Facebook
Connect on LinkedIn
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I was also at the event and made it in to several of the Wonderland nodes. It was nice to see and interact with other avatars and not just have to listen to the looping product demos. I made the mistake of using the same linux box I had been hosting a local wonderland server on so my sound was not functioning, but others said it was working fine. Visually it isn’t much to look at yet which might have put off some, but that should be taken care of with the arrival of a new graphics engine shortly. The feature I find interesting apart from the built in application sharing is the ability to launch and share X-apps if running on solaris or linux. This adds a great deal of functionality by leveraging existing applications. (I am so tempted to see what would happen if I launched a wonderland client from inside wonderland) Looking forward to watching this grow.
Hello Trevor, thanks for the additional info. The Sun SL island filled up before I could get into the event, but they’ve given me access to the Education Grid so I’m eager to try it out.
I think you’re right that the graphics engine will make a big difference. Also, NMC’s involvement will insure a lot of publicity to the SL education community.