Sun entering virtual worlds market, maybe aiming at educators?
The Sun Worldwide Education and Research conference, which starts today and runs until Wednesday has an intriguing entry on tomorrow's agenda entitled Project Wonderland, Darkstar and Immersive Education. If you follow the link to their (long) video about the session you will see that it isn't quite ready to roll yet, but they have taken a number of the issues with Second Life (which they identify at the 800lb gorilla in the room) and they are deliberately aiming to circumvent them.
I have to say that, being hard of hearing, I found the video really hard to watch and understand - the audio quality isn't the highest, but I think from what they said, they are working, deliberately, with open source code wherever possible, or code that is going to be open sourced soon. Many will regard this as an improvement on Second Life, although Linden Lab are aiming this way. However, it also appears that there are some high cost outworld tools required - for example outworld modelling is possible, but only in Maya if I understood their too quiet speech.
At first, and second take, this is not yet ready to go live, but it is looking like it could be a real contender, and it does look like they have learnt the lessons from Second Life.
