Project Bluegrass integrates IBM’s Jazz platform with a 3D environment to facilitate collaboration. Combined with IBM’s move to open the source for Jazz, IBM is facilitating virtual worlds as 3D collaborative tools, one of the most promising areas of virtual world development.

The interface is more Habbo Hotel than Second Life, but the underlying concept of using 3D objects to help users intuitively understand content and its relationships to tasks, project updates, and other users is sound. The 3D world presented in the demo by IBM (to be presented at the Lotusphere conference in Orlando) is meant to “engage Generation Y” but I think they may have some work to do on the interface. Gen Y is used to Quake, and this is more of a tween/Mario Brothers mold, but I’ll try not to get stuck on the cartoon look.

The approach seems powerful enough. In spite the cartoon feel of the world, you could intuitively feel how content can be better organized in a 3D space. Each “building” type represents a class of objects. Huts, for example, represent individual team member spaces. I liked how the huts (let’s face it, virtual cubicles) included grass growing around them to represent how much work the team member has on their plate - my own hut would be surrounded by weeds and would likely be impenetrable.

The key to the Bluegrass environment is its integration with Jazz, but also with other streams of information. Thus their claim of bridging the divide between Baby Boomers and Gen Y. The ‘more mature’ user could use the tools they’re used to - e-mail, project schedules, task lists, while their Gen Y companions run around in a 3D space watching the RSS feeds float up from team icons and objects.

Interestingly, they elected to flip to a 2D view for collaborative brainstorming.

I’m not much of a tech expert, but as a platform the idea looks like its been well thought-out related to the integration of information and how to display it visually in a 3D space. While it’s just a demo, a few things had me wondering, aside from whether the interface would need to move towards something a little more sophisticated so that going to work doesn’t feel like entering Legoland.

One is that object creation seems limited to 2D text and content. Most of the collaborative content is based on the idea of creating bubbles, or viewing bubbles that arrive from RSS feeds or project data. This is a project work environment and not a 3D modeling work space, and while it might be more intuitive to understand connected 2D content in a 3D space because the inter-relation of objects can be seen more readily, it will be interesting to see as other platforms (and the full deployment of this one) can use the actual creation of 3D objects as part of a new language for how concepts and ideas are developed.

The second is that the space doesn’t SEEM to embed Web site or document content, but then I might have missed that part of the demo. Working in a collaborative brainstorming space to discuss, vote on, and sequence ideas and concepts is useful, but what’s more useful is the approach of Qwaq (and Croquet) in which Web sites and other content can be pulled directly into the space.

Those are hardly criticisms - more observations of what seems to me exciting about virtual worlds for collaboration, and IBM seems to have taken a major step - thinking through and executing on the idea that as information gets increasingly complex and more and more people become comfortable navigating 3D spaces, that these environments might be more intuitive than a GANT chart for managing ideas, tasks and teams.