Qwaq provides 3-D virtual collaboration solutions for enterprises. Qwaq Forums are virtual environments used to facilitate interactive online meetings, workflow, project and program management processes, real-time document editing, document sharing, and online training. Qwaq Forums are deployed as virtual workspaces for virtual offices, program management, virtual operations centers, facilitated meetings, and corporate training.
Businesses are moving beyond marketing in virtual worlds and are exploring other applications of virtual worlds (see a recent BusinessWeek article & slideshow). Enabling collaboration among remote workers is one such application (see our past posts and paper on this topic). A variety of virtual world options or platforms have been available for supporting remote work and these include Second Life, Qwaq, Forterra, and Tixeo. Last week I had the rare opportunity to see an emerging virtual world called Wonderland, the product of an open source project, Project Wonderland, sponsored by Sun Microsystems. During a conference call with our colleague Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Investigator of the Collaborative Environments Project at Sun Microsystems, Becky Jestice and I were lucky enough to get a tour of Wonderland. Nicole graciously spent over an hour to show us some of the impressive features of Wonderland. The tour was so impressive that I want to devote a post to some key aspects of Wonderland:
* Virtual meeting participants can use voice to communicate with one another;
* If necessary, participants can connect to a Wonderland meeting via telephone;
* Private conversations between participants are possible in a virtual meeting;
* Participants can share applications; and
* Anyone can try out Wonderland (see instructions below).
