MPK20:
Sun's Virtual Workplace

One question we are frequently asked is why use 3D for a collaboration environment? While it might be possible to build a 2D tool with functionality similar to MPK20, the spacial layout of the 3D world coupled with the immersive audio provides strong cognitive cues that enhance collaboration. For example, the juxtapostion of avatars in the world coupled with the volume and location of the voices allows people to intuit who they can talk to at any given time. The 3D space provides a natural way to organize multiple, simultaneous conversations. Likewise, the arrangement of the objects within the space provides conversational context. If other avatars are gathering near the entrance to a virtual conference room, it is a good guess that they are about to attend a meeting in that space. It is then natural to talk to those people about the content or timing of the meeting, just as you would if attending a physical meeting. In terms of data sharing, looking at objects together is a natural activity. With the 3D spacial cues, each person can get an immediate sense of what the other collaborators can and cannot see.

MPK20 is a sample virtual world built using the Project Wonderland open source 3D virtual world toolkit. This toolkit provides the means for creating the world as well as the avatars and animations within with world. Worlds created with the Wonderland toolkit contain live, shared applications as well as immersive audio. As you explore MPK20, you hear people, music, or videos in much the same way as you would walking around the physical world. The current version of Wonderland supports the sharing of Java and X applications, but the vision is to eventually be able to use, edit, and share all deskop applications within the virutal world.

The Wonderland toolkit is built on top of the Project Darkstar server infrastructure. Darkstar, a platform designed for massively multiplayer games, provides Wonderland with a scalable and secure multi-user infrastructure well-suited for enterprise-grade applications.

One of the most unique features in MPK20 is the tight integration of high-fidelity stereo audio. Using our open source voice bridge, jVoiceBridge, not only do you hear recorded audio in stereo at CD-quality, but you also can hear other live people at this quality. jVoiceBridge adapts to allow remote users with lower bandwidth connections to use lower audio fidelities, including telephone-quality.

If you are having a conversation, the high-fidelity audio allows you to hear people's voices coming from the appropriate directions, as you would in the real world. Since voices or other sounds become softer as you move away from them, MPK20 easily supports multiple, simultaneous conversations within the same virtual space.

By integrating the Sun Labs Porta-Person with MPK20, meetings can bridge the virtual and physical worlds. The Porta-Person, which exists in the physical world, includes a camera, speakers, a microphone, and a computer, all on a remote-controlled, rotating platform. In the virtual world, users can remotely control the Porta-Person by interacting with a 180 degree video panorama of the real world. Those participating in the real world see a view into a virtual conference room, or other virtual space, on the Porta-Person display.

The Porta-Person, which supports stereo audio input and stereo output, provides high-quality audio communication between the real and virtual worlds.

The goal of MPK20 is to allow users to conduct all their real work within the virtual environment so that doing private work and sharing with others can be accomplished seamlessly, without the need for a special application sharing tool.

The team room and surrounding private work spaces, pictured below, are filled with documents and whiteboards. Team members, regardless of physical location, can maintain awareness of what their team is working on by scanning the contents of the room. With appropriate persmissions, these documents in the team room are available for all team members to modify. Anyone else who happens to be in the room at the time can watch the updates or help with the editing.

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.