IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM

7:00 PM, Thursday, September 17, 2009

IBM Innovation Center, 404 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA

Project Wonderland: 3D Toolkit for Building Virtual Worlds

Nicole Yankelovich, Sun Microsystems Laboratories

Project Wonderland is an open source toolkit for building 3D virtual worlds for business and education collaboration. Within a Wonderland virtual world, people can conduct business, interact with team members, and have chance encounters with colleagues, all using natural voice interaction. Most importantly, real work can be accomplished with Wonderland's support of X and Java applications as well as innovative telephone integration. With application sharing as the default, people can create, edit, and share documents within the virtual world.

From a developer perspective, Wonderland is a highly extensible environment for creating special-purpose components or whole virtual worlds that can integrate with sensors, streaming data, enterprise authentication systems, and other external data sources.

This talk will focus on the philosophy behind Wonderland, show some of the key features, and describe what people in the open source community have already built with the toolkit.

Nicole Yankelovich is Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments program at Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Burlington, MA. She is also the team lead for Project Wonderland, an open source toolkit for building 3D virtual environments targeted at business and education collaboration. Other research projects she has directed include Porta-Person, a telepresence device; the Sun Labs Meeting Suite, a suite of tools to augment audio conferences; Awarenex, an instant messaging client with advanced presence features; and SharedShell, a multi-user terminal program that works across firewalls. Nicole holds six patents related to interaction design and has published numerous articles and book chapters on collaborative environments, speech applications, and hypertext.

The IBM Innovation Center < https://www-304.ibm.com/jct09002c/isv/spc/waltham.pdf> is located at 404 Wyman Street, Waltham. There is free parking in the garage at the north end of the building. To reach the meeting room, walk out the front of the garage and around to your right to the front door of the building. Directions to the room will be available when you sign in at the front desk.

For more information contact Peter Mager (p.mager at computer.org)

Updated: July 28, 2009.