My interest in Sun's ProjectWonderland is growing and growing.  After great presentations at the Serious Virtual Worlds conference, and more at VW London, the Wonderland team have now produced a series of short videos highlighting the features of the current 0.4 release and what's to come in 0.5 - I recommend them.

I really think that Wonderland is the dark horse of the Virtual World platforms when it comes to enterprise use. It was written from the ground up to be a scalable communications platform to support dispersed staff.  The voice and telephony integration seems first class.  The collaboration tools are great, and sharing documents, or even desktops is already possible.  Finally its written in Java and is totally open source. So why is everyone talking about Second Life and OpenSim?  Two main reasons I can see.  Firstly Wonderland is not pretty - the avatars are clunky, walking animations are terrible and the avatars can't sit or climb stairs.  Secondly there's no one huge world you can go to to see the possibilities.  There are a few educational institutions that have Wonderland worlds online that you can log into (see http://virtualnorthstar.org/ ) but frankly none of those will immediately wow you.  That's not to denigrate the amazing efforts of the institutions involved - there's great work going on there.  Educators have adopted Wonderland in droves mainly I suspect because it is free and extensible - their choice for the same degree of collaboration would be Qwaq forums, and that's prohibitively expensive for education. 

I'm hugelylooking forward to the major enhancements of Wonderland 0.5 - and I think an off-the-shelf Persistent Immersive Environment designed for enterprise use based on Wonderland would be a winner.