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On the heels of IBM’s recent announcement about their new mainframe-class machines geared for 3D virtual worlds comes the news that Sun Microsystems has constructed its own 3D virtual environment for business. Currently an in-house demo project, the software could be ready for release within six months, according to a Sun engineer quoted in this InformationWeek story.

The system is currently known as MPK20, which identifies it as the 20th building at Sun’s corporate campus in Menlo Park, California — which is known as MPK and in fact houses only 19 buildings. The MPK20 environment is built atop the open-source Wonderland software and the Project Darkstar infrastructure designed to run online games.

According to Sun, the key difference between MPK20 and other 3D environments is that it is explicitly designed for business use. The Wonderland software permits the creation of live, shared applications that are ideal for a workplace environment, Sun says. And of course the virtual world lets Sun employees work together no matter their location in the real world.

One interesting thing about Sun’s vision for MPK20 is that the company seems to be looking toward a mirror world environment for business. “The next stage in the MPK20 project is to design complementary physical and virtual work spaces. If personal and team workspaces primarily exist in the virtual world, then people in physical spaces should be able to project their workspace around them no matter where in the world they are and interact seamlessly with people who are remote.” [Emphasis added.] It will definitely be interesting to see exactly what that means. (more…)

Chris Jordan takes awfully cool photographs that are for the most part “portraits of American mass consumption.” They’re also awfully big, often measuring around five feet tall and eight feet wide. They have to be large-format to fit the 15 million sheets of office paper (used every five minutes) or the 106,000 aluminum cans (drunk every 30 seconds) that Jordan photographs. (The prints are actually huge composites of lots of smaller photographs.) As of yesterday, Jordan’s latest series, Running the Numbers, is on display in the virtual world of Second Life at the Q2 Gallery »in SL’s Palulop region«, which is run by SL resident Sebastian Standish. (more…)

The NBA launched its presence in the virtual world of Second Life this morning, following an in-world press conference yesterday that featured NBA commissioner David Stern making the announcement. Built out by the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog), the NBA region in SL features a basketball arena, streaming video of classic NBA games and more recent highlights, virtual NBA merchandise (natch), and four half-courts where fans can play HORSE or enter dunking contests. I saw a demo of the HORSE game recently, and I have to say that it looks like the Sheep have hooked up some pretty cool scripting and animations for this one.

a BrandWeek story on the build quotes Stern as saying that the NBA in SL will at first host “a unique event every day through the end of this season, which will wrap up sometime in June. Eventually, Stern said that as Second Life grows, the league would like to see its players and fans’ avatars interacting. ‘We could turn this into the ultimate 3D fantasy game,’ he said.”

Good virtual basketball fun. NBA fans can apparently sign up via NBA.com, though I couldn’t find the link. Check things out for yourself at »NBA Jam Session«, »NBA Arena«, or »NBA Courts«.

With 4.7 million “active users,” Zwinky lets you create and share avatars, emoticons, cursor icons and other stuff that teens seem to love, all from your browser’s toolbar. Now, IAC, the company behind Zwinky, hopes to lead those millions of users into its new virtual world. Known as Zwinktopia, the world “will provide Zwinkies a social community with 29 unique locations and dozens of games and activities,” including shopping, chat, games, events, and hanging out in dorm rooms. As in worlds like Club Penguin, users can earn a virtual currency, called Zbucks, and buy clothing, furniture, etc.

As a virtual world, Zwinky looks like nothing special. But it’s interesting that creating at least a 2D Flash-based multiuser environment like this has now become simple enough that you can just add such a service on top of one that’s already been adopted. Are these kind of virtual world services going to proliferate? What will be more interesting is when Web sites start to have these kind of “presence-based” services associated with them, almost like a Gabbly with avatars that an move around. I don’t think I’ve seen one yet, though Me.dium comes close.