Project Wonderland: A Toolkit for Building 3-D Virtual Worlds
TS-6125

Interest in virtual world technology has grown dramatically as people have seen its potential for applications such as business collaboration, distance education, virtual trade shows, training, and other "serious" endeavors. Existing virtual world systems developed primarily for entertainment purposes fall short, however, in terms of flexibility, extensibility, and the ability to handle proprietary data. Sun Labs designed Project Wonderland to address these issues.

This session introduces Project Wonderland, a Java technology-based toolkit for building virtual worlds. Worlds built with Wonderland let you play and socialize with rich 3-D graphics, expressive avatars, and audio communication. But Wonderland worlds also let you get real work done, with extensive meeting and telephony support and live, in-world application sharing. Best of all, Wonderland is designed to be completely extensible: It is written entirely in the Java programming language and is being developed as an open-source project.

This session focuses on how developers can use Wonderland to build innovative 3-D worlds. It gives you an overview of the Wonderland architecture, focusing on how to build and run your own virtual world. It covers the Wonderland server, which is based on two open-source components: the Project Darkstar game server and the jVoiceBridge voice mixing technology. The presentation also describes the Wonderland client, based on the Java 3D API and open graphics formats. For both the client and server, the presentation focuses on extensibility, demonstrating the hooks to enable you to add your own content and functionality to a virtual world.

This session is for developers on the Java platform who would like to experiment with virtual worlds. Expect plenty of code and live demos of cool features such as application sharing, telephone integration, and more.

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