Sun go Through the Looking Glass
I was interested to read this article on how Sun have set up a pavilion in Second Life, and are using it for virtual meetings:
Tuesday, Sun became the first Fortune 500 company to hold an 'in-world' press conference to show off its new pavilion in Second Life, the popular 3D online world. Sun said it plans to invest in the Sun Pavilion as a place for developers to try out code, share ideas and receive training.
"Our problem is that every year our largest developer conference (JavaOne) attracts about 22,000 people and we get to meet with them face-to-face for a week," said Sun's chief researcher John Gage during the virtual event. He said Sun hopes to reach millions of Java developers in Second Life with training and other support features.
On the #kde-ruby IRC channel we've begun discussing how we might write a whiteboard or shared text editing app. Kelko has set up a wiki page and summarized his thoughts so far. I think collaborative P2P software is a really interesting area to think about. Do we need something simple like Gnome's Gobby, or the KDE mateedit app. Or a more elaborate app that would allow you to use a shared whiteboard over a protocol like jabber? Or should we aim to go straight to attempting to integrate legacy desktop environments like KDE with shared 3D worlds like Second Life or Croquet?
I've been looking through the Croquet site trying to find a definition of the 'wire protocol' for Tea Time/Tea Parties, but can't really find anything precise enough to do some sort of implementation from. The closest I got is this presentation Hedgehog Architecture. It talks about a 'Router' instance for each 'Tea Party' (a shared space for avatars to meet), and the router takes each event in the Tea Party and gives them a message sequence so that each message can be ordered in time. So for a simpler collaborative editor do we need all the messages for edits to the shared text to go through a central server? That's what Gobby does, and it works on a LAN, but would it introduce too much lag in editing text if typing every character involved a round trip to a server on another machine?
Another architectural issue is how to implement and use a protocol like jabber. One very interesting project is Telepathy, it is based on a DBus server that clients interact with that understands various P2P protocols. As I've recently added QtDBus support to QtRuby this would be a great way to experiment with them, and so I've begun getting code genertion for the Smoke library with the KDE4 kdelibs headers so we can start a KDE4 DBus based telepathy client.
Finally, how about this better avatars - software that allows you to transfer your Second Life avatar to Croquet. Imagine getting your avatar crafted by the 21st equivalent of a Saville Row tailor - they would measure you body in Real Life and suggest a body and clothes that looked enough like you for people to recognise, but had those 'special touches' that only an experienced avatar tailor could make.
"Would you like to look serious sir, or maybe you would prefer something more cartoonish and fashionable? We have some nice anime-look avatars on special offer this week. If you're a nature lover who would prefer an animal with human augmented facial musculature - we do a popular line in rabbits.."