However, the avid team plans to keep up the great work they have done so far counting on the open source community. The team wiill soon release Project Wonderland v0.5 Preview Release 3 this week.

Nicole Yanchelovich (project lead) reminds us of the countless university projects and corporations utilizing Project Wonderland as a virtual world platform and several companies offering Wonderland-based services. Also  noted in her post on January 30, 2010, is the power of the community that keeps the project alive and she calls for participation:

“Any concrete help you can give us would, of course, be welcome, but what we are asking for now is your moral support and your continued participation in our thriving community. Let’s stand together in our determination to keep this project moving forward. If you would like to contact me privately, please feel free to do so at nicoley @ dev.java.net.”

From Wikipedia we have:

Stigmergy is a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization.

For stigmergy in other contexts visit: 

Web Stigmergy

Definitions of Stigmergy

Stigmergic Collaboration

The upcoming .5 release promises some interesting features as well as some powerful improvements to the interface and system as a whole.

Videos here:

http://slx.sun.com/1179271798

https://slx.sun.com/1179271797

https://slx.sun.com/1179271796 

https://slx.sun.com/1179271795

I’m pasting some of the thoughts fellow bloggers have had on their posts about the event:

First Educational Gathering in Wonderland

By timwang

(…) over 60 avatars gathered on the Sun’s island in Secondlife, cuing up to get a “ticket” for the first experimentation of the Wonderland Project by Sun’s Microsystems. The event was organized by the MediaGrid which is a computational grid platform that promotes 3D virtual learning environment. (…)”

On Tim Wang’s eLearning Blog 

Wonderland Works!

By Katherine W. Prawl:

“Friday was a red-letter day. I attended an event in Second Life for an education group, hosted by Sun Microsystems, which was intended to introduce the group members toProject Wonderland. Especially exciting was the fact that Sun and its partners (which include NMC) are exploring the possibility of allowing avatars to navigate from theEducation Grid running on Wonderland servers.”

On the NewMedia On the Go blog

Sun’s Wonderland & Education Grid Demo

by Chris Collins

“Today the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative launched the Education Grid onSun’s Wonderland platform.

Aaron Walsh from Media Grid launched the initiative from within Second Life and the island quickly filled up with many more avatars waiting to get in to join the demonstration.”

Fleep’s Deep Thoughts blog

His research project has driven him to come up with different “privileges” and status for users which dictates what files, objects and places they can see and/or modify.

This brings much more relief for companies and academic institutions that plan on adopting Virtual Worlds for learning and collaboration but are worried about data security.

Like Wright says, the advantage of Wonderland over other Virtual Worlds is the fact that it is in its early stages and already considering these issues, which means that these types of functionality will be built in the program and not “around it” once it is already built, which is the case with most Virtual Worlds out there (if they even consider such issues at all.

Nice read.

Keep up the good work guys!