At Sun Labs' open house today, we talked to Nicole Yankelovich who's working on research project MPK20: Sun's 3D Virtual Workplace. MPK20 is available under the open source license and based on Sun's own gaming server (Darkstar) to simulate a virtual world a-la Second Life. The Silicon Valley company is also looking to open source project Darkstar. At the beginning of the year, Second Life's maker, Linden Labs, open sourced its viewer application and promised do the same for its server side application. Yankelovich also mentioned Open Croquet as another open source virtual world engine.
In a few days, the Havok4 engine will be released gridwide. Public "live" testing of these servers were done starting September 2007, and LL deems it's finally ready for the entire grid. Most of the problems with crashes are physics related, and thus H4 will help fix those.
rodsky71 3 years ago
Let me know when Linden decides to write a client which doesn't constantly crash, graphics which render at XBOX HD quality and provide non-lagging multi-user interaction at HALO quality. Bungy could create a high quality world which would blow away the Linden technology. I absolutely LOVE SL but really hope somebody buys the world from them and switches out the technology.
teed7 3 years ago
LOL fanboy eh? shakes head Yes, we do that in SecondLife as well. The apps are always third party. There's nothing special to collaborative work--it's just a matter of scripting.
rodsky71 4 years ago
Fanboy, maybe you missed the real time document view/editing. It's not just about "conferance meetings", she just showed how with 1 program you can edit documents and other work that usually would take multiple programs and windows to do. Not only that but with this 1 program you can edit those documents in a multiplayer enviornment so that you all can work on the same project in real time over the net.
EliteSLi 4 years ago
How does one exactly define "business oriented"? My company has been holding business meetings in Second Life and have used SL solely as a business platform for the past 8 months. So to me, the argument that MPK20 is "more business oriented" doesn't seem to hold water.
rodsky71 4 years ago
I'd like to see examples of this!
ladydtrain 4 years ago
This is a fascinating way to apply second life technology in a more business oriented way
phdiam 4 years ago