SUN researcher Nicole Yankelovich presents an open-source 3-dimensional virtual environment, that can do many tricks, including application sharing in a like-VNC way.

Its called project wonderland, and builds on darkstar, an open source gaming server platform. Underneath, there is looking glass, an open source 3d platform.



Its a business-oriented, knowledge-work oriented environment, published open source. Unlike secondlife, which is closed-source and leisure-oriented.

With systems like this and all data represented as RDF on a Semantic Web, using Semantic Desktop applications, users could intuitively place their work in a virtual environment and share their ideas. Looking forward to see how this integrates with Semantic Web.

thanks to Henry Story for the link and his story on wonderland.

Mike Bergman blogged about a new release of Microsoft Astoria, where they announce support for Atom, JSON (who-hoo), and Web3s.

I doubt that this can be taken as a signal from the whole Microsoft Corporation but is rather the view of project members of this one project. Nevertheless, its going to be interesting what Microsoft will do: bunker themselves in (terran style) and hope that their customers will never hear of open standards? I doubt, and therefore I do not fully agree with Mike:
This is yet another stunning and lame attempt by Microsoft to replace open standards with proprietary ones. Get a clue, Redmond!

They probably got their clue already, but for big companies it always takes time... HP (Jena), IBM (SLRP) and SUN are faster this time.