I had the opportunity to join other SL educators in the first introduction of Wonderland. Sun had an introduction in world and then guided participants to download the Wonderland client. They are allowing registered educators in their new virtual world. A Sun employee gave me a one on one tour. The graphics were primitive but the interface with applications was very nice. With one click of the mouse I had control of the white board and other applications.
I tweeted the introduction in that occurred in SL:
The Wonderland servers could be mirrored or backed up at any number of places. Each node is hosted by anacademically oriented institution. Wonderland was done by educators for educators to get this technology in their hands can be bounced around and hosted on any number of servers. Sun isencouraging universities to become a “node” on the grid – let us know if you want your center to be involved and host your own.
It was a new experience tweeting (taking dictation essentially) while someone else was speaking. Keeping it to 140 characters and remembering what was being said while keeping up with the in-world and MSN chat was a real challenge. It was an impromptu thought to begin with and I didn’t do such a great job, but it was fun experiment.
When I finally finished downloading Wonderland, and logged in, I found that my friends on Macs were having trouble. I asked Nigel from Wonderland to help them, and he immediately logged into gchat and tried to talk them through it. Most of the developers are using Macs and know how to get past the Java issues. It took him and Annie a couple of days to work through the problems but he persisted and I was impressed. Especially when I found out he helped Terran too! Way to go Nigel – thanks!
Like I said, the graphics were very primitive, once they’re upgraded (significantly) I can see that it might be a better alternative to SL for some things, especially for corporations that want to hold collaborative distance meetings. However, I think it will be a long time before Wonderland offers significant competition for SL.
Photos to follow
