Standards For Interconnecting Virtual Worlds 142
Tao Takashi writes "Linden Lab, developers of the popular 3D platform "Second Life" started to think about an open standard for interconnecting virtual worlds. The motivation behind this is to make Second Life more scalable but also to allow connection of other grids not hosted by Linden Lab. The process of defining components and protocols is supposed to be handled completely in the open with community participation. When finished the protocol documentation is supposed to be submitted to standard committees such as IETC, W3C etc.
The discussion has already started on the Second Life wiki and you can also find a first architecture proposal by Linden Lab."
Whoo hooo! (Score:4, Interesting)
I only hope that if they are altruistic enough to see the value in doing this, that they are good enough to make it as open as it should be.
Or else it could end up like this [suso.org]
Open Standards, hmm? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or even a way to directly interface with the human mind....
Gibson, you were right.
Re:Whoo hooo! (Score:4, Interesting)
Economies and Currencies (Score:2, Interesting)
cross-mmo accounts? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone up for a game of Croquet? (Score:2, Interesting)
Enter Croquet: http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page [opencroquet.org]
Croquet allows for the creation of multiple, connected worlds through a system of portals and is already finding use in educational scenarios. Oh, and the fact that it is open source doesn't hurt either.
-PS
Web 3.0 (or 3D) ? (Score:5, Interesting)
I want to be able to rent property in Second Life (or some other virtual world) and have it "link" to my own server, so that when your avatar enters my house, you (transparently) continue playing on my server, using my bandwidth, CPU and my rules.
That way, the main Second Life grid can handle much more people, while I can decide how much I want to handle. If I'm IBM, I will put up a server farm to handle my advertisement/community events. If I'm a private person, I'll plan for 10 concurrent visitors with enough spare capacity to handle spikes of 20-30.
One way or the other, my virtual home is no longer dependent on Linden Lab's server farm. If Second Life gets overloaded, the visitors in my virtual corner of the virtual world won't suffer. They might even come to me because my place always runs smoothly. Suddenly, there is an interest in upgrading the infrastructure beyond "it must work, mostly".
My place can be small (one house) or large (an entire island). Just like property in SL is already. Sure, the transition will be a bit tricky (at what point exactly are people transfered to a different server, and how do they "see" the content inside/outside?), but that's a technical challenge that is, in principle, not that hard.
In fact, I'd be perfectly happy to have it work the Oblivion way (e.g. you click on the door, you are teleported inside. Windows both ways are faked with textures if at all.)
What is cool about this is that it removes the scarcity of land. I can rent a small house in SL and have an entire world inside. Hey, why not? It's not as if physical laws matter. Sure, Linden will have to adapt their business model, but since the server load isn't theirs anymore, they should not have to worry too much.
Re:Web 3.0 (or 3D) ? (Score:3, Interesting)
When the client goes to the new server, does that server then have to request and store all the graphics associated with that avatar? Or do other users have to request the data from the originating server? At what point do you say 'this character belongs to this server'? If someone creates a character on my private server, then goes elsewhere -forever-, am I forced to host their files on my server forever? What if the originating server goes offline... Is my avatar defunct?
I think this is a neat project, but I think that the fundamental way Second Life works (everything is server-side) won't support it. Everything will have to be client-side, which means SL could no longer charge people to upload graphics, sounds, and animations.
On the other hand, maybe they don't mean for this to be for the common man. Maybe they are only interested in creating a 'standard' that can only be used by companies willing to give them money and provide dedicated hosting for their own characters.
Remarkably like Electric Communities in 1996 (Score:4, Interesting)
It was a cat herding party of monumental proportions. The first year was the design phase - it was amazing. We found out a need to fix Java so it had distributed garbage collection, closures, and the like. We made our own VM with these add-ons, and invented a world specification language called Pluribus for knitting together object aspects which represented the multi-party nature of distributed awareness.
Like many first attempts at "ontological revolution", the performance was less than spectacular. It didn't take long to build stuff that was beyond our understanding, either. Later, when aspect-oriented programming was invented, and the rest of the world starting thinking about distributed cyberspace, it has become possible to do what we were trying to do then. Even Java has caught up, co-opting most of the add-on features we had to come up with.
My advice to those approaching the problem today: