On the subject of interoperability with other services, there may be so little in common between services such as SLâ„¢, WOW, and others, that none of the viewers could be adapted to work in the other worlds and provide a usable experience. In this case, interoperability may be confined to simple communication such as voice or text chat and probably would not present a threat to “walled garden” services until a common viewer platform could be developed.

My own concern, regarding virtual worlds, is precisely with the development of purposeful applications based on advanced AI technology. And from this perspective, it’s very clear to me that interoperability and open standards will be Very Good Things.

Right now, for each virtual world or game engine I want to hook my AI up to, I’ve got to do way too much customization work, both on the client side (graphical assets are obviously not the same in SL as in most other platforms, for instance), and on the server side (building a proxy to intervene between my AI code and each particular world or game server). So, the process of creating purposeful apps is slowed down a lot by the fact that rolling one’s app into each particular world requires so much fiddling-around work (that is really not critical to the particular value of one’s app).

To take an analogy, I can make an animation in Flash and then embed it in all sorts of websites without needing to write a proxy between my animation-widget and the specific webserver or application server running that website. But with virtual worlds this level of simple, obvious interoperability is lacking, and not for any terribly good reason, just because virtual worlds are early-stage, and didn’t develop from some centralized government project but rather more organically.

Relatedly, Dan Miller and others have been helping me think through the problem of integrating robot simulators and virtual world engines. We’ve come up with some nice, concrete ideas in that regard … but, wouldn’t it be nice if we could avoid reimplementing them separately in every world engine/client combination? … and avoid making this kind of integration specialized only to one platform (OpenSim or RealXTend or whatever…).

So my overall point is: in many cases, the interoperability is what’s going to foster the creation of the apps. Interoperability and open standards provide some direct, obvious end-user value, but they also have a more indirect (and maybe more dramatic) value to the user in the way they create an environment making it more economically viable for individuals and companies to create purposeful virtual-world applications…

– Ben Goertzel

Thanks for you comment! If you have the time please do listen to the panel on “Open Source and Interoperability” – full recording here – many of your points are answered more fully there. But here are a couple of short answers.

1) The interoperability and Open Grid effort is by no means limited to OpenSim and SL. We made call during our panel in LA for other virtual worlds to get involved in the effort. And when I have talked to Linden Lab, Lively and Vivaty engineers and Vast Park (just happen to be the ones I have met recently) there seems to be much interest in broadening the effort.

As close cousins, SL and OpenSim, are an obvious pair to begin with. However, creating a heterogeneous ecosystem for parallel innovation is what will be beneficial for the eventual emergence of standards. Again this is explained in much more detali by David Levine, IBM, Mic Bowman, Justin Clark-Casey, Intel, Adam Frisby, OpenSIm/ Sine Wave, and Mike Mazur, 3Di

But, for good measure, here is one of the points David Levine, IBM, made on parallel innovation again:

“The point about parallel innovation is that there are several ways to evolve things. Open Source, tends to foster the addition of features, in common to the main trunk of development. Its very much about everyone building together. Sometimes, we need to or want to build stuff which works with that main trunk of development, but doesn’t share code, or has to fork. That’s where standards come into play.”

Also note this post on eightbar for a deeper understanding of virtual world interoperability.

2) Also re your point about the “purposeful applications” one of the direct results of the emergence of standards will be that the current isolation of virtual worlds will come to an end and there will be an amazing flowering of innovation and useful applications. I hope you will read my upcoming post on “Web 2.0 Made Easy for OpenSim” about the recent integration of JSON support to OpenSim. Part of the emergence of standards for virtual worlds will involve integrating support for existing standards like JSON.

3) Yes there is resistance to standards from some within the virtual worlds community. And perhaps that is because, at this early stage, many of the business models have arisen around a proprietary closed model. But the situation is changing fast. And, the fundamental importance of virtual worlds as the first real time collaboration over the internet in a rich, immersive environments is too valuable to remain an isolated niche market. That is why I try in this post to give credit where credit is due to Linden Lab for their vision re open source and open protocols so vital for the emergence of standards.

I think small mindedness has resulted in a lot of misunderstanding about how standards will emerge in virtual world community. For example, there seems an inclination to put off the process to some distant future set of “vapor standards” to be decided by a committee somewhere, instead of rolling up the sleeves and getting down to doing the work as Linden Lab, OpenSim and IBM have begun doing.

Plus, there is the political / strategical problem. All VW platforms don’t see an interest in being open or interconnected. Why would WOW want people to jump to SL ? (Although I would understand why SLifers would like to jump to WOW). Its like putting ads on your website : you just drive traffic to a third party. And unless they find real value to it (not just answering some tech geeks requests), they won’t make the leap.

Interesting POV, thanks for sharing.