MPK20:
Sun's Virtual Workplace
On any given day, over 50% of Sun's workforce is remote. MPK20 is a virtual 3D environment in which employees can accomplish their real work, share documents, and meet with colleagues using natural voice communication. Just like on Sun's physical Menlo Park campus, known as "MPK," inhabitants of the virtual MPK20 office building can work together in planned meetings, or can talk informally in unplanned encounters. Unlike the physical campus, however, in MPK20, community can be built and maintained without the constraints of physical location.
Overview
The MPK20 software is built on top of the Project Darkstar infrastructure. Darkstar, a platform designed for massively multiplayer games, provides MPK20 with a scalable and secure multi-user infrastructure.
The first MPK20 prototype uses the Cosmic Engine from Immediate Mode Interactive. This Java-based game engine provided us a way to quickly create a virtual world and populate it with animations, avatars, and most importantly, sound. As you explore MPK20, you hear people, music, or videos in much the same way as you would walking around the physical world.
Our target user environment is Wonderland. This open source project provides the ability to create a virtual world with live, shared applications. For MPK20, this allows us to create in-world workspaces for individuals, teams, and even whole companies. If all your regular productivity and programming tools exist within the virtual world, and they all can be shared, this enables a whole new type of always-on collaboration capability. As you work in your virtual MPK20 team room, you can turn and talk to any other colleagues in the team room, regardless of a person's physical location. This capability provides a single place for distributed teams to work, communicate, and collaborate.
High-Fidelity Audio
One of the most unique features in MPK20 is the tight integration of high-fidelity stereo audio. Using the SunTM Labs Voice Bridge, not only do you hear recorded audio in stereo at CD-quality, but you also can hear other live people at this quality. The Voice Bridge 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.
Porta-Person: Interaction with the Real World
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.
Team Rooms and Live Applications
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. Once MPK20 moves to the target Wonderland environment, those documents shared in the team room will also be 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.
Mixed Reality
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.
Sun's Virtual Workplace
On any given day, over 50% of Sun's workforce is remote. MPK20 is a virtual 3D environment in which employees can accomplish their real work, share documents, and meet with colleagues using natural voice communication. Just like on Sun's physical Menlo Park campus, known as "MPK," inhabitants of the virtual MPK20 office building can work together in planned meetings, or can talk informally in unplanned encounters. Unlike the physical campus, however, in MPK20, community can be built and maintained without the constraints of physical location.
Overview
The MPK20 software is built on top of the Project Darkstar infrastructure. Darkstar, a platform designed for massively multiplayer games, provides MPK20 with a scalable and secure multi-user infrastructure.
The first MPK20 prototype uses the Cosmic Engine from Immediate Mode Interactive. This Java-based game engine provided us a way to quickly create a virtual world and populate it with animations, avatars, and most importantly, sound. As you explore MPK20, you hear people, music, or videos in much the same way as you would walking around the physical world.
Our target user environment is Wonderland. This open source project provides the ability to create a virtual world with live, shared applications. For MPK20, this allows us to create in-world workspaces for individuals, teams, and even whole companies. If all your regular productivity and programming tools exist within the virtual world, and they all can be shared, this enables a whole new type of always-on collaboration capability. As you work in your virtual MPK20 team room, you can turn and talk to any other colleagues in the team room, regardless of a person's physical location. This capability provides a single place for distributed teams to work, communicate, and collaborate.
High-Fidelity Audio
One of the most unique features in MPK20 is the tight integration of high-fidelity stereo audio. Using the SunTM Labs Voice Bridge, not only do you hear recorded audio in stereo at CD-quality, but you also can hear other live people at this quality. The Voice Bridge 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.
Porta-Person: Interaction with the Real World
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.
Team Rooms and Live Applications
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. Once MPK20 moves to the target Wonderland environment, those documents shared in the team room will also be 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.
Mixed Reality
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.
