Standards For Interconnecting Virtual Worlds

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."

XMPP + X3D ?

[atamyrat]

I'm not a standards guy neither a game developer, but I'd propose something based on other standards, like XMPP [xmpp.org] for messaging, connectivity, chat and X3D [wikipedia.org] for virtual world 3D models.

Re:XMPP + X3D ?

[everphilski]

XML is kind of big, when you have to throw it over internet connections. Not just once, but once for every recipient. Imagine you are in a zone with 100 people, and you send a message to an 'out of character' channel that hits everyone. Now that message has to get sent out 100 times, plus the XML overhead. There are ways to do it with much less overhead (binary). Might not be as self-describing but with good documentation, not that difficult.

Nothing new there ...

[OzPixel]

Once again, the MMO world grabs ideas from the world of Muds.
UnterMuds did the same thing 15 or so years ago - you could log in to your home Mud, then travel through portals to other Unter-compatible Muds.
(there was a downside - I took one character through a few portals that way, but then got stuck because the Mud I was on went down. Attempting to log in to my "home" Mud didn't work because it tried to forward me on to the next one.)

Re:Open Standards, hmm?

[nine-times]

replacing the ubiquous web browser with an SL client

I still don't understand why people think this is going to happen, or even why you'd want it to happen. Which is easier and more efficient, to read from a web page, or to read from a web page rendered as some kind of sign in a 3D virtual world?

I'm certainly not claiming that there's no room for improvement or innovation in the web browser, but there are reasons why that model won out and continues to be used today. Reading and writing is often more effective and efficient than speaking and listening, and the document model is efficient for reading and writing. Rendering the document into a 3D world is a waste of time and resources.