Sun Microsystem’s Project Wonderland’s Security Levels
In this blog post Nicole invites Timothy Wright, a Ph.D. candidate from University of Notre Dame, to write a post about his research interest in Project Wonderland and Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) from a security and data storage perspective.
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.
Love your new site design.
Intriguing stuff that Wright is doing. I’m not entirely sure I buy the data protection argument although I realize it’s a bit of a tricky sell – as they point out, it’s better to start from scratch with these kinds of specs than find work-arounds. However, it’s also nice to start with a gazillion object asset base and existing code so you can get a learning module up and running fast, with reasonable fidelity, deep options for avatar expression, etc.
Data security can be handled in many open virtual worlds by holding the data “off grid”. I don’t deny the point, but it’s not to say that this is needed because others can’t manage the same things.
I’m curious about the ‘viewable/not viewable’ function however, because it makes a lot of sense if you had courseware that people aren’t taking concurrently. Courseware objects should only become available as you reach that part of the lesson – I’m going to put some thought into that, because it’s a good point and a really useful feature.
And having said all that – Wonderland, being built from the ground up, can be “built to spec”. But then, so was Croquet no? I can never quite tell where that’s at. In any case, a useful post in particular because of how it points out what the needs are for educators.
(And yeah, the system we’re working on will handle some of this functionality plus integration with Web-based learning objects but that’s another story).