Virtual Worlds
I had a first look at Sun’s project wonderland last week. It is nothing staggering at first look to anyone that has been playing in Second Life, but it has some nice features like the immersive 3D audio, and the ability to hang applications like web browsers and open office docs on the wall and share them with other users. There is also the ability to bring in the real world via audio and video conferencing.
Hopefully we can get our own wonderland server up and running in the next few weeks so we can do some more detailed investigation of its potential in the educational space.
The only drawback at the moment is a lack of Mac support due to the client requiring Java 1.6, and this currently isn’t available for Mac - but hopefully will be soon.
July 29th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Wonderland works great on a Mac! See the platform notes on the wiki:
http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javadesktop/PlatformTips#Mac_OS_issues
If you have any trouble getting your server to run. please post a note on the Wonderland forum and someone will be happy to help.
July 30th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
The latest version of Wonderland does support Mac OS since it no longer has a dependency on Java 6. Download a daily build and you should be able to run Wonderland on Mac OS Tiger or Leopard with the bundled Java 5. See:
https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/binary-builds.html
scroll down to “Daily (nightly) Builds”.
Enjoy!
August 5th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
[...] Well, while I am in the winter wonderland of Queenstown somebody from Sun kindly added a comment on my previous post about Wonderland to point out that it does not run on Mac, as it is no longer dependent on Java 1.6. I have just installed the server and client on my Macbook Pro and it runs fine. I am looking forward to getting the server installed on a linux box so I can play around with some of the shared application functionality. [...]