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Project Wonderland: Good Avatars Make Good Neighbors

7/2/2008

By Trent Batson

Stanley Kubrick, or Arthur C. Clark, was wrong: Video conferencing, over phone lines or the Internet, will not become the most popular way to meet visually at a distance. Virtual 3D immersive environments will.

Wonderland

Sun Microsystems's Project Darkstar and the Wonderland Toolkit for building 3D spaces show why virtual reality, with avatars representing the real people who are present, is better for business and education than video conferencing. How can this be? How can a game-like environment be better than seeing the real thing?

Shortcomings of Video Conferencing

Most of us have seen "the real thing" and perhaps have wondered why interactive video conferencing is not more common. A few reasons why this may be:

 - Video conferencing is difficult to set up correctly for a group (yes, we know that iChat is as easy as toasting bread for one-to-one). For formal meetings where quality of transmission is vital, a video technician must be involved in most cases.

 - Facilities for video conferencing are expensive, so the number available on any campus will be small -- and, thus, distance becomes a factor in the decision to use it.

 - The better the video gets, the more it can seem weird: For example, if one person is conferencing with a group, then the group may see just a close-up of the one person. The person can appear to be almost in the room and sitting at the conference table -- but she's not, and so she violates social rules about where she looks and to whom she appears to be speaking.

A representation of a person that's too close to real can be more disconcerting than engaging. Xerox Parc tried having two geographically distant offices appear to be adjacent in a meeting room, but the spookiness factor was one reason this experiment was not continued.

How Virtual is Better

Having a peek (through video conferencing) into a room is not the same as being there, nor even as good as seeming to be "there" in a virtual environment. In a virtual environment, you see your own avatar, your other self, right there in that space. You are situated. You see and hear things from that vantage point, and so seem more present than in a video conference. In a video conference, you are stuck at the peephole in to the room; in a virtual environment, you can move and talk as if you were in the room; you are a holograph of a sort.

Sun's Darkstar

We can see these advantages of the virtual world in Sun Microsystems' MPK20 (MPK is short for Sun's Menlo Park Campus), built on the Darkstar stack (http://research.sun.com/projects/dashboard.php?id=168) and made 3D by the Wonderland Toolkit (https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/).

When you walk into the conferencing room in MPK20 via your avatar, you see a large conference table with chairs around the table and some other avatars sitting in some of the chairs. All eyes are on a large video panel in the conference room. On

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