Inside Sun's Virtual World for Internal Collaboration
When Sun Microsystems saw Second Life, it saw an opportunity for businesses to internally collaborate behind the firewall. In this Q&A with one of the main project leads, CIO.com finds out how virtual worlds fit into Sun's world, and down the road, maybe everyone else's as well.
What makes virtual worlds more compelling for that social interaction than existing technologies, such as phone and video conference?
Up until now, Sun, like most companies, has used audio conferencing. We’ve used a little bit of video conferencing too, but a lot people working at home don’t have video because that’s their personal space. So we mostly use audio conferences. The problem with this is we’re not getting the social interaction and the informal brainstorming you’d get in person. We figured [we] can create a virtual world where you can begin to re-create that social interaction, and then we could really create a wonderful place to bounce ideas off each other, both as a group or just between two people.
The consumer virtual worlds, like Second Life, have seen pretty significant user adoption. With that comes the need to scale. When you think about Sun's virtual world and getting thousands of employees on it, how will you plan for scale?
Second Life and other online games use this process called sharding. This means pieces of the virtual world are hosted on specific servers. So servers will have their capacity, and when it fills up, it fills up. For example, if a bunch of people decide to visit an island in Second Life, and that island begins to fill up with avatars, so does the server assigned to it. Meanwhile, you have all of these other unused servers. This is a huge problem in almost all the multiplayer games.
So at Sun we decided we’d use Darkstar, our game server. It’s a scalable platform that doesn’t do sharding. Instead, the [virtual world] developers write their applications as if they’re on one giant server. Then the underpinnings of the Darkstar servers allocate resources as they're needed. If one server starts to fill up and get near capacity, it goes to another one.
When will something like this become available for large enterprises?
Right now, Project Wonderland is open source and people are free to use it. But this whole project has been more popular with people initially than we thought it might be. So we have started to work with business development to see what Sun could do for customers. Maybe we could provide hosted services, or even manage the service (and server) for them behind the firewall. There are a lot of different models to explore. But for right now, we want to get more people using it here internally.
