Wonderland
I attended the Virtual Sun User Group Webcast on Project Wonderland and Immersive Learning at Saint Paul College on the Sun Learning Exchange today, virtually of course. Most of the first presentation was stuff I already knew, but both presentations were pretty inspiring nonetheless. I’ve been a fan of Wonderland for years. A few weeks ago I exchanged emails with Jordon Slott about participating in the Wonderland open source community. I put it on my list of things to do Real Soon Now but so far it has just set there. Maybe now I’ll dive back in. Jordan told me about quite a few enticing improvements in the latest developer release….
I confess to a tad of reluctance to step into something so related to Sun. I’ve been trying to detach detach detach after 22.5 years ended with the January layoff. But one thing that Sun does right is produce open source software, and one of the features of open source software is that it elevates the work of the community. Open source licenses in effect recognize that the value of a piece of software may transcend the value of the company who produces it in the first place. “May” being the operative word, of course.
More certain is the fact that you can learn a ton by participating in an open source community, and in this case, I also know first hand already that Wonderland is some of the coolest technology around. It is really, really fun. Oh! and today I learned that the new release supports importing objects in the Collada format, and there is a free (I think?) plugin for 3DS Max, ColladaMax, so maybe I can yet ask my son to make me something I need in 3DS Max (he has a student version) and then import it into my world. In the previous version, he was unwilling to bother with learning Blender to do it.
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