{"id":3648,"date":"2014-02-08T20:57:10","date_gmt":"2014-02-08T20:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=3648"},"modified":"2014-02-08T20:57:10","modified_gmt":"2014-02-08T20:57:10","slug":"one-small-step-for-an-avatar-one-giant-leap-for-virtual-worlds-one-black-hole-still-exists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=3648","title":{"rendered":"One Small Step For An Avatar, One Giant Leap For Virtual Worlds, One Black Hole Still Exists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On the 10th October 2007 the Reuters news agency in Second Life published a news story :\u00a0<a title=\"Reuters Story\" href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20071012040731\/http:\/\/secondlife.reuters.com\/stories\/2007\/10\/10\/ibm-linden-lab-seek-open-borders-for-virtual-worlds\/\" target=\"_blank\">IBM, Linden Lab seek open borders for virtual worlds<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>IBM and Linden Lab said on Tuesday they will work on ways to let people use a single online persona in different online services.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Interoperability is emerging as a key goal of the nascent virtual world industry, which attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment on the hopes that video-game graphics and rich 3-D environments will supplant flat Web pages.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The idea was that you&#8217;d be able to create an avatar in one virtual world and take that avatar to other virtual worlds. This was an extremely interesting development. There&#8217;s a quote in that article from then Vice President of business at Linden Lab, Ginsu Yoon:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>\u201cWhen you talk about avatars going in and out of virtual worlds, we truly believe that expands the market &#8230;..It&#8217;s not a situation where there is a fixed pie and everyone is fighting for slices. It\u2019s really key to making the market bigger.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\">So Linden Lab were interested and within a year, further exciting developments would be unveiled. On the 8th July 2008 &#8230; I think .. American dates are arse about face, yes I&#8217;m sure they mean 8th July 2008, anyway on this date, <\/span><a style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\" title=\"IBM Linden Lab Announcement\" href=\"http:\/\/community.secondlife.com\/t5\/Features\/IBM-and-Linden-Lab-Interoperability-Announcement\/ba-p\/634490\" target=\"_blank\">Hamilton Linden revealed that a major breakthrough had been achieved in Virtual Worlds<\/a><span style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\"> :<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>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\u2019s an important first step toward enabling avatars to pass freely between virtual worlds, something we\u2019ve been working toward publicly since the formation of the Architecture Working Group in September 2007. These are still early days, however, so amid all the excitement, we thought it would be helpful to clarify exactly what we\u2019ve done \u2014 and what still lies ahead.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a title=\"Torley Opensim landings\" href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/v45EOma7wDo\" target=\"_blank\">There was even a video, directed by Torley<\/a>. The existence of the video of course led to accusations that the whole thing was faked, that the OpenSim grid landing never really happened and people pointed out that a flag was waving when it should not have been as there is no air in the OpenSim atmosphere. Others suggested that there should have been a crater or at least some imprints from the landing from one distant virtual world to another. However I disagree with the conspiracy theorists, this really happened and here&#8217;s the video to prove it:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/v45EOma7wDo\" height=\"315\" width=\"420\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>This was an exciting breakthough of course and one that some people felt would make virtual worlds have greater reach. The blog post had a Q&amp;A and I&#8217;ll select a few of them :<\/p>\n<p><em>Q: Why is that significant?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>It marks the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another, an event with implications for the entire virtual world industry. As the name suggests, the\u00a0<a title=\"Second Life OGP\" href=\"http:\/\/secondlifegrid.net.s3.amazonaws.com\/docs\/specs\/SLGOGP-draft-1.html\" target=\"_blank\">Open Grid Protocol<\/a>\u00a0used in the project enables interoperability between virtual worlds. With this experiment, we\u2019ve taken a first step toward not just interconnecting Second Life with other virtual worlds, but other virtual worlds with one another. An open standard for interoperability based on the Open Grid Protocol would allow users to cross freely from one world to another, just as they can go from one Web site to another on the Internet today.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Q: When will Second Life Residents be able to teleport to OpenSim servers, or other virtual worlds?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>We don\u2019t know exactly. We\u2019re working toward that goal but we\u2019re still very much in the experimental phase.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Q: What is Linden Lab\u2019s ultimate goal with these experiments?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Linden Lab sees interoperability as essential for virtual worlds to reach their full potential. In addition, interoperability will enhance Resident experience and the new architecture will improve scalability and stability.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>So we can see that Linden Lab felt that this was important in 2008, so what happened? No genuinely, what happened? I have no idea why this didn&#8217;t progress with Second Life&#8217;s involvement. I can recall being at a Robin Linden office hour where Robin was talking about what sort of costs should be charged for people wanting to connect a sim to Second Life, but I don&#8217;t know why Linden Lab moved away from this sort of virtual world interoperability.<\/p>\n<p>There were of course always going to be concerns. <a title=\"Nobody Fugazi on interop\" href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20080803122304\/http:\/\/www.your2ndplace.com\/node\/1258\" target=\"_blank\">Nobody Fugazi raised some<\/a>\u00a0at the time:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Security<\/li>\n<li>Names<\/li>\n<li>Alternate Names<\/li>\n<li>Copyright<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All issues that needed to be considered, but were they insurmountable?\u00a0Virtual world interoperability does exist, OpenSim utilises <a title=\"Hypergrid\" href=\"http:\/\/opensimulator.org\/wiki\/Hypergrid\" target=\"_blank\">Hypergrid<\/a> for this interoperability. How does Hypergrid deal with these issues?<\/p>\n<p>However interoperability involving Linden Lab appears to be as dead as dodo. Considering how excited Linden Lab were about this and how they once viewed interoperability as essential, it seems somewhat odd that they pulled the plug on it but maybe they felt that there would be too many problems with trying to play nicely with too many unknown variables, maybe there are people out there who can shed more light on the issue, but interoperability does have potential.<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"twitter-share-button\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/share\" data-url=\"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=3648\" data-via=\"Ciaran_Laval\">Tweet<\/a><br \/>\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\">\/\/ <![CDATA[\n!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=\/^http:\/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+':\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');\n\/\/ ]]><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the 10th October 2007 the Reuters news agency in Second Life published a news story :\u00a0IBM, Linden Lab seek open borders for virtual worlds. IBM and Linden Lab said on Tuesday they will work on ways to let people use a single online persona in different online services. Interoperability is emerging as a key &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=3648\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;One Small Step For An Avatar, One Giant Leap For Virtual Worlds, One Black Hole Still Exists&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,14],"tags":[1035,665,664,19,360,1022,1023],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6rJUK-WQ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3648"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3648"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3650,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3648\/revisions\/3650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}