Today the New Media Consortium (NMC) announced a $250,000 two-year collaboration with Sun Microsystems to launch the Open Virtual Worlds Project, an effort that is aimed at making it even easier to learn, work, and exchange ideas in virtual space. The project will develop a range of standards-based, portable open-source educational spaces, content, and objects, and use them to extend Sun Microsystems's open source Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland virtual world platforms.

As part of the Open Virtual Worlds effort, Sun Microsystems will become the NMC's newest Platinum partner, which is the highest level of corporate participation in the NMC, and reflects a strong commitment on the part of a company to the work of the NMC and its members. At the same time, the NMC will also join the Sun Immersion Special Interest Group, which is a Sun Microsystems Inc. sponsored community dedicated to advancing the state of open source technology and content for virtual worlds and gaming in education.

In launching the Open Virtual Worlds project, the NMC will build on its extensive presence in Second Life and add to the services it offers educational institutions with a suite of services aimed at those who need a secure extensible platform or simply prefer an open solution. Open Virtual Worlds will be a new project housed within NMC Virtual Worlds, along with its extensive Second Life project.
The NMC remains deeply committed to the Second Life platform, and plans to continue to offer comprehensive services for it for the long term. At the same time, we believe that Sun's open-source platforms will meet the needs that many institutions have for higher levels of security, clear ownership of intellectual property, and portability. Adding a suite of open-content, open-source services will add an important dimension to NMC Virtual Worlds that we hope will help members continue to explore the evolving range of options unfolding in the virtual world arena.

The project's business plan includes scalable hosted solutions that will make it very easy for any institution to experiment with the educational spaces and content that is planned for development, as well as very high quality custom development services. Over the long term, just as we have done in Second Life, revenues from custom development will support a wide range of activities, content, and events that will be available and open to all.

See the official press release for more information at http://www.nmc.org/news/nmc/nmc-launches-open-virtual-worlds-project

As the Open Virtual Worlds project unfolds over the next few months, we will add a major new component to the NMC Virtual Worlds website that will be the repository for news, information, downloads, and more.

Larry Johnson
Chief Executive Officer

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The New Media Consortium
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