Nortel announced a virtual worlds initiative, developed under the ominous codename Project Chainsaw, and shored up the technology through the purchase on “3D voice” company DiamondWare.

Project Chainsaw, dubbed “web.alive”, is a “3D Web networking solution that allows users to collaborate, socialize and conduct business in a virtual environment with life-like visual and audio features, within the security of their own corporate networks”, according to CNN Money.

The purchase of DiamondWare brings 3D spatial sound to their virtual world play as well as for “traditional telephony and conferencing applications, mobile unified communications or for Web 2.0 virtual world environments,” according to Keith Weiner, CEO of DiamondWare.

The Nortel virtual world initiative hopes to overcome the barriers in current technologies for meeting and collaborating. They point out that current approaches to meetings put barriers in front of natural communication styles:

“We may even use telepresence for some types of meetings; a fantastic tool when the hardware and networking bandwidth is available. And yet despite all of these different tools with all of their many features, we still find that there are gaps. Very few tools on the market can address the last two communication styles: broadcast with peer-to-peer interaction and free-flowing conversations.”

The Project Chainsaw blog gives a hint of the virtual world to come, and it looks a lot like, hmmm…Wonderland maybe, or maybe the internal IBM virtual world built on the Torque engine (Nortel is quiet on the platform on which their world ios based):

Project Wonderland
Speaking of which, the stable 0.4 version of Project Wonderland was released. A video highlighting its features can be viewed here. The binary builds are available on Java.Net.

The Argument for Web Integration
The rationale of the big switch and chip folks when it comes to developing virtual world initiatives is integration with Web and firewalled apps - if you can’t port in documents and collaboration tools, from things like Lotus Notes, for example, then it’s just a place to go rather than a place to work.

This is similar to IBM’s Project Bluegrass about which I’ve blogged previously and promised a visual 3D space integrated with Lotus.

Like Bluegrass, which went quiet since providing a peek at development, it also remains to be seen what Nortel’s development timeline is. With every major company now making a virtual world play, you start to feel like it’s on the tick list for IT:

- Social networking apps? Check
- Cloud computing? Check
- Virtual world in development? Check
- Great, let’s go for lunch.