Hamlet Au over at New World Notes recently posted : Cross-Platform Virtual Reality is Here: Watch High Fidelity Unite Vive, Oculus, and PC Users in the Same Metaverse. The post was regarding the High Fidelity post regarding users with different interfaces interacting in High Fidelity. I covered this in my last post. The development is an impressive one.
Hamlet’s headline was a tad misleading and some folk thought the post was going to be about people from different virtual worlds being able to interact in a single virtual world. This has been done before, but the potential was never fulfilled. I have talked about this before.
Just over seven years ago Hamilton Linden blogged IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement :
This is a historic day for Second Life, and for virtual worlds in general. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another. It’s an important first step toward enabling avatars to pass freely between virtual worlds, something we’ve been working toward publicly since the formation of the Architecture Working Group in September 2007.
This was quite big news, Linden Lab issued a press release. The news was covered by Antone Gonsalves at Information Week and Erick Sconfeld at TechCrunch. I will embed a video of the epic moment at the end of the post.
Alas things didn’t work out and the project seems to be dead and yet, as demonstrated in the comments on Hamlet’s post, there’s still a lot of interest in interoperability between different virtual worlds.
However there are many challenges to interoperability, they include standards, protocols, architecture working groups, cross platform collaboration and avatar rights. This is a very complicated area and yet some of the issues will have to be addressed one way or another.
In terms of protocols and standards, hardware requirements are going to be one area where standards will surely have to develop. Not many people are going to be happy if their HMD is supported in one virtual world but not another.
There has been talk in both High Fidelity and Project Sansar that custom skeletons may be supported, but with both projects still in Alpha that may be something that doesn’t happen any time soon.
In the coming years there are likely to be a lot of virtual world experiences coming to the market, but the dream of interoperability seems further away than it did in those heady days of 2008. The challenges are massive, but that does not mean that hopes of interoperability should be consigned to the dustbin of history, as engagement with VR rises, it simply makes sense to visit the ideas of interoperability again.
I don’t expect this to happen any time soon, but I do expect it to happen eventually. I’ll end this post with that video, over seven years ago, but it was a special moment.