Toward Interoperability in Virtual Worlds…
Just as tough as going across the border out of or back into the good ol’ US of A – interoperability between virtual worlds is still not a seamless proposition. Transporting an avatar from one world to another seems to be a hot topic of virtual world users these days. I do wish that it were a seamless transition and one simple answer, but as of now it remains extremely complex. Interoperability from world to world seems to be a common theme that is circled around at virtual world conferences. Going from my customized SL avatar to a generic ‘male tourist’ (don’t ask) default avatar in Active Worlds I was a little bummed. Although once in Active Worlds I could switch to a female tourist- then would go to another in-world destination and (poof!) I was once again a male tourist. So the whole idea of interoperability between worlds is a pretty good topic to bring up and address. Not only is interoperability specific to only avatars but also to virtual goods/ digital assets as well. So we’ll just skim the surface on this as I don’t want to open a whole can of worms on intellectual property laws and the technical differences right now…we’ll dive in deeper at a later time.
Let’s not overlook the avatar name issue. Although I may be Megan Ricantaur in one world when I enter another world that name may already be taken. I believe that cross-world movement will happen, it just remains unseen as to what extent it will be enabled. Maybe someday there will be a universal virtual world client- but for now it’s onto creating different avatar identities for different worlds.
We know that Linden Lab has been dabbling around with the whole interoperability issue. So could interoperability be the future of the web? Will you be able to connect seamlessly to a variety of virtual world platforms? Opensim and Second Life to Active Worlds and Twinity? Will there ever be a single point of portability across worlds? Maybe in the future, but certainly not in the near future. A 3 to 5 year timeframe?? Yes, I think so (or rather I hope so). So let’s work to bring standards to virtual worlds and perhaps voyaging across the metaverse and beyond!
Let’s recap one of the highlights of virtual world interoperability that has been done so far:
“In July 2008, IBM and Linden Lab announced an interoperability agreement following successful tests in which avatars were teleported “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.”
