Friday, May 11, 2007

Wonderland and JavaOne

Probably the best presentation I saw at JavaOne was left to last. James Gosling previewed Wonderland. At first I thought this was just yet another Second Life, avatar-based demonstration. However, when they started showing the avatars working within the virtual world with the same programs (Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.) as you'd use in the real world, it took on a completely new importance. This was very cool. Being able to create rooms where you could display your code dynamically and updateable (on "glass" walls, no les ;-) as though you were in a physical equivalent, show presentations, have true meetings where (almost) everything you'd want to do if you were face-to-face could be done, is a significant step forwards. Nice.

2 comments:

Michael Neale said...

Is this project looking glass? I remember a similar thing to this which I used to play with in smalltalk (you could fire up browsers etc). Plus you could bring up the smalltalk object browser at any time and tinker with stuff (scary cool).

When it works well, could really be useful. We just need multiple 40 inch screens and tactile interfaces and we will never need to leave the house !

Mark Little said...

Sorry the delay in replying Michael.

I missed the start of the presentation, but I thnk it's based on Looking Glass. I'm dropping all IM chat and moving there next week ;-)