Back in July, Toysoldier Thor blogged about virtual landmarks. The basic idea here is that your landmarks can follow you, the same as a domain name follows people and companies around. Toysoldier came up with this idea because he was in a position whereby he needed to move the location of his art gallery, this move meant that all the landmarks out in the wild, would become redundant. People who used those landmarks, would not land at Toysoldier’s new store, they’d arrive in the sim location where the store used to be.
Toysoldier created a Jira, which can still be read, on the issue. However it should also be noted that Ann OToole created an earlier Jira, back in 2009, on similar lines. Toysoldier links to this in his proposal. The proposals are slightly different but they address the same core problem, other people may have created Jira’s or proposals too. However Toysoldier’s proposal gained traction via a forum post on the official forums and it was discussed at the simulator user group meeting on 3rd August, in attendance there was Cheesey Linden ….. seriously!
On the 7th September, Toysolider reported in another forum thread:
LL has finished the phase of investigating the idea of VLMs and they have determined that VLMs are feasible enough to warrant moving it to the next phase of determining DEVELOPMENT PRIORITY !!
I asked if this is good news and Cheesey said “yes – that is progress”.
After the meeting I did some further investigation and asked a Linden if he/she seriously saw VLMs having a legit hope or am I wasting time pushing this idea. I was told that he/she was surprised how much traction the VLMs got internally. The LL techs grasped the concept and value very quickly and that the VLM solution could potentially help LL with several other functions (especially the centralized VLM-MS service).
See, Cheesey was involved! However since then, there has been little word on progress, until an independent development was announced by Darrius Gothly yesterday, whereby Darrius has come up with his own solution to address the issue.
Now this is both encouraging and of course in some ways disappointing. Darrius developing an independent solution means there’s a lack of conistency on the horizon if Linden Lab do indeed develop their own system. However Darrius’ solution looks like it will do the job, it’s not free as there are costs associated with such ventures, it currently comes in four versions, ranging from as little as L$299, through to L$5999. Bear in mind that these prices pay for subscriptions, you can read about that here. However you will probably want to read the whole page, to see if you think it will be worthwhile for you.
Now one use for these kind of landmarks, which Andrew Linden actually mentioned, would be for a link of the week. I’m not suggesting you do this with Darrius’ solution, I’m just pointing out why these ideas are useful. So imagine you have an explorers group, every week you’d update the link of the week and everyone in the group who had the virtual landmark, would see it updated, or maybe it could be updated for events and you could change the description or image for a changed event. As I said, I’m going off on a bit of a tangent here, but there are more use cases for these sort of concepts than moving store.
Darrius’ version goes beyond the inworld experience and will also update SLURL’s on web pages and the SL Marketplace too if you follow the instructions correctly, so it has added value. At the current time, the SLURL’s are generated via SLURL.com format rather than Maps.Secondlife.com, this is because Maps doesn’t display the optional image that can be added properly according to Darrius. SLURL’s can also take advantage of Ordinal Malaprop’s form for generating SLURL’s, even though the solution can’t link to Ordinal’s later website!
All in all I think this is a good development, it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on, whether Linden Lab develop their own solution remains to be seen, maybe they will surprise us, or, develop object DNS so we can communicate inworld nicely with objects using HTTP!