Comments on: Without financial backing, Project Wonderland’s future is in question

By: Erica Driver

Erica Driver — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:00:13 +0000

Yesterday, the Project Wonderland team announced Open Wonderland, a fork of the Project Wonderland code. Info is here in this Wonderblog article: http://blogs.projectwonderland.com/2010/03/11/announcing-open-wonderland-update-your-bookmarks/. Along with the new open source project, the team has launched a non-profit, called the Open Wonderland Foundation, to act as the governing body for the open source project. Here is info about the foundation: http://openwonderland.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=173&Itemid=126.

By: Erica Driver

Erica Driver — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:55:46 +0000

Nina: Thank you for your comment. I’ll take a crack at answering your questions.

Q: Who are Wonderland’s competitors?

A: Other open source enterprise immersive software platforms include OpenSim (www.opensimulator.org), Sirikata (www.sirikata.com), and VastPark (www.vastpark.com). Technology decision makers, though — and certainly business decision makers — look at Wonderland in comparison to not just the other open source platforms, but to commercial software and public virtual worlds. We are covering about two dozen players. The list is here: http://www.thinkbalm.com/about-us/.

Q: How much do the alternatives cost? What is the IT support required to install / run / maintain? Are they behind corporate firewalls?

A: We went into some detail on these questions in the recent ThinkBalm report, “The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide” (http://www.thinkbalm.com/2010/01/19/thinkbalm-publishes-immersive-software-decision-making-guide/). We didn’t publish the specific pricing of the various products, but we do have this information. The level of support the technologies require varies extensively based on many factors. Some of them do have products that run behind the firewall, including: A World for Us, Altadyn, Amphisocial, ARI, Avaya, Forterra, IBM, Linden Lab, ProtonMedia, ReactionGrid, Rivers Run Red, Teleplace, VastPark, and Virtual Italian Parks.

As analysts covering work-related use of the Immersive Internet, we’ll be watching what happens with great interest. We’ll be tracking the evolution of Project Wonderland, as well as the Forterra OLIVE software SAIC recently acquired. This is going to be a busy year; we haven’t seen the end of the changes. We sized the enterprise immersive software market as $50M USD in 2009 — too small to sustain two dozen vendors/products. This is definitely a painful time in the evolution of an emerging technology market. Painful, yet inevitable.

By: Nina

Nina — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:13:11 +0000

I understand your analysis from the perspective of the end user. But given that Wonderland is also a development kit, what other competition exists? (Can you comment on this?) It is because of this and the (no)cost that the community has risen to the ocassion and meets on a regular basis.

From the end-user perspective, what are the alternatives? How much do they cost? What is the IT support required to install/run/maintain? Are they behind corporate firewalls?

Just a thought: The layoff was of the team, not the software. This doesn’t mean it’s a guarantee, or that interest won’t wane. I just think that because of the flexibility of the platform and the large number of Java programmers out there, it may be a bit more resilient.