During the past couple of years, virtual worlds have received a lot of media attention, especially Second Life, the virtual environment created by Linden Lab that 1.3 million people actively use to play games, do business and live alter egos via their avatar stand-ins.

But when Sun Microsystems thought about how it could use a virtual world to improve internal collaboration and facilitate social interactions among its 33,000 employees, spread out across offices around the world and in numerous home telecommuting sites, it began to think about building its own virtual world behind the firewall.

Thus, Project Wonderland was born. Started about a year ago as a collaborative effort between Sun and the open-source community, Wonderland is a virtual, 3-D website that allows people to build virtual worlds based on Java programming. Sun’s internal world, MPK20, was built on this platform and started in June 2007. The name stems from the company’s Menlo Park, Calif., corporate campus, which has 19 buildings (MPK1 to MPK19), making MPK20 the virtual world extension. While the group building and developing MPK20 spends the most time in it, Sun hopes to start bringing in more user groups in the coming months.

Sun Microsystems’ Project Wonderland

CIO.com’s C.G. Lynch visited Sun’s labs in Burlington, Mass., to see MPK20 for his own eyes and talked with Nicole Yankelovich, who works as the primary investigator at the company’s collaborative environments group.

CIO.com: What led Sun to start building a virtual world for its employees? Was there a tipping point that spurred it?

Nicole Yankelovich: About a year ago, we informally did a study by interviewing a bunch of our employees who work from home. Meanwhile, we tracked the statistics of how many people badge into our facilities each day. We found that many people worked from home full time, and some at least part time. This isn’t bad. [Without the commute] they often work longer hours and are very productive. Meanwhile, we also have a lot of people traveling to visit with our customers.

In the end, what we found was on any given day, more than half of our employees are working remotely. There are a lot of good benefits of a distributed workforce, but there are also some drawbacks. What they’re missing is the social interaction. We know, from business literature, that social interaction is very key to good business outcomes. You need to be able to trust people in order to get work done effectively or negotiate in business. Virtual worlds seemed like a great opportunity to address this problem.