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Are you one of those people who need something more to get you excited about the future of virtual worlds than, “I am in ur browser, chatting in 3D?”

Well, perhaps, it is time for you to take a close look at the burgeoning open source ecosystem surrounding OpenSIm.

Jonas Karlsson, Xerox, (avatar Poinky Malaprop) wrote an excellent post (I quote his great title above!) explaining why he is not turned on by the big bubble of browser based worlds that have sprung up recently - Vivaty, Lively, JustLeapIn, ExitReality, WebFlock and more

This flood of browser based worlds into the virtual world scene has caused many commentators in the field to articulate clearly what is important about virtual worlds and where these lite weight worlds fall short (see Dusan Writer) and how they can’t realize virtual worlds’ potential as innovative disruptive technnologies that will actually improve the human condition.

Even the the mainstream of the blogosphere can see how retro and limited this new crop of VWs lite are (see PC World’s look at Lively).

I am not arguing that these “stepping stone” browser worlds won’t be something that many people try out. But, like Jonas and Gwyneth Llewelyn, I believe that the destiny of virtual worlds lies elsewhere. I agree with Jonas, the keys that opened the doors for virtual worlds to bring something new, exciting and very beneficial to human communication were sown in Second Life with the “in-world creation tools, that enabled co-creation and a new form of collaboration” - none of these “in ur browser” wannabes are even close to offering this kind of paradigm shifting experience. Though some of them may play a role in introducing a wider audience to a limited sense of the possibilities of avatar interaction.

Why is OpenSim Important?

While Second Life demonstrated most of the key paradigm shifts to social interaction possible through virtual worlds, open source and open standard development, as Linden Lab has acknowledged for a while now, are central to unleashing the full potential of virtual worlds into a scalable, global and world changing phenomena.

A number of interesting open source virtual world projects are out there. But, of all these, OpenSim is beginning to show its got the right stuff to move virtual worlds forward quickly, in a positive direction. Open standards are not arrived at by ivory tower committees. They are worked out on the ground in a process which requires the magic of “rough consensus and running code” (this phrase is drawn from a conversation I had with Mic Bowman, Intel, about interoperability of virtual worlds).

This magic, “rough consensus and running code” is exemplified in the rapidly developing ecosystem committed to growing OpenSim technology - OpenSim provides powerful and fexible software modules for building virtual worlds.

There is a powerful community of amazing diversity working with OpenSIm - from many enthused individuals to contributors from some of the world’s largest corporations, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft (see the many commentaries, here and here, in the blogosphere on the MS dev community entry into OpenSim and for my interview with Kyle Gomboy of the MS dev community and Zain Naboulsi, Microsoft, see here).

And, while Linden Lab do not contribute code directly to OpenSim yet, some of Linden Lab’s top developers are involved in a major an interoperability effort between Second Life and OpenSim. This effort has also been spearheaded by David Levine (avatar Zha Ewry), IBM.

David’s interoperability patch and Linden Lab’s OWG (Open Grid Protocols) will go into Beta on the LL Preview Grid at the end of the month. To become part of this Beta you must join the Gridnauts group in Second Life. The code developed from this interoperability work will eventually be part of the OpenSim trunk.

There is a common misunderstanding about OpenSim. OpenSim is NOT a virtual world, and is certainly not as many in the blogosphere like to suggest a virtual world competing with Second Life. On the contrary as the err “love child” of Second Life, it carries the qualities of Second Life into the future. And Linden Lab’s acknowledgement and support of OpenSim is clear in their interoperability efforts.

Adam Frisby sets the record straight on his blog:

OpenSim is not a virtual world. It’s a piece of software, which if configured in a specific way allows you to run a virtual world. Consider it another way - the Apache Webserver is not a website, but ~50% of the websites online are running Apache.

I have blogged some of the diverse projects OpenSim has spawned including the highly innovative realXtend (see here, here, here and here -my most recent post on reX) and Tribal Net (see here). But Adam includes an excellent list of some of the diverse applications that have been developed on OpenSim and explains the difference between application and platform in this post.

Check out this wonderful slide show of the work some 3rd - 4th grade students are doing with their quests on the Opensim based GreenbushGrid VW.

How to become Involved in the OpenSim Community

Here I am as noobie in OSgrid standing in front of the fountain built by master builder and OpenSim developer, Nebadon Izumi (Michael Cerquoni in RL). Charles Krinke told me: “The fountain behind me was built by Nebadon last September and the day scripts were sufficient to run the particle system, we turned the water on.”

OpenSim is alpha still. But there is an immense pride and excitement to being there a

nd contributing in these ground breaking days. The OpenSim Wiki is the most complete source for information on OpenSim but there is a nice tutorial here on White’s Virtual White blog on how to get your own standalone openSim server up and running in Windows Vista (hat tip to Dusan Writer)

But there are many different ways to become part of the OpenSim effort.

One of the important entry points to the OpenSim development community, other than joining the IRC channels #opensim, #opensim-dev, and #osgrid is to visit and participate in activities in OSGrid (see later in this post for a complete list of the goals of OSGrid).

OSGrid is also the place where developers, content creators, and ordinary users can support the OpenSim effort. Two good times to find the OpenSim community gathered in OSGrid are:

“Test Hour”, “Wright Plaza”, Saturday 1900UTC, Noon PDT, 3PM EDT.

“Office Hour,” Wright Plaza, Tuesday 1900UTC, Noon PDT, 3pm EDT.

OSgrid is the second oldest OpenSim grid. It was created in July, 2007.

The picture opening this post is taken inside the Scriptwerks building, Wright’s Plaza, OSGrid. This room is part of the effort in OSGrid to teach scripting. It is built by Pablo Pharmanaut (avatar name), a pharmacist in Northern California. Pablo has set up a number of demonstrations of scripting including the scripts themselves. The scripts are also on the forum. One of the goals of OSGrid is to encourage folks to copy the scripts and use them to learn how to script.

The picture below shows Wright’s Plaza where office hours are held. OSGrid guru and organizer Charles Krinke (avatar Charles Krinkeb) is showing me a demo of OpenSim’s version of html on a prim, which is implemented differently from the LL version. And on the right is the “grafitti” board written by Justin Clark-Casey that is used to set the agenda at meetings now.

Th first “Office Hour” in OpenSim was on a blank island, no physics, no scripts, no clothes, last August. This blank island is now Wright Plaza, named for Michael Wright, the creator of OpenSim. Stephan Andersson, known as “Lbsa” is honored in the second plaza created.

There are several ways to join the OpenSim effort. And Charles Krinke the tireless and brilliant community organiser for OSgrid pointed out to me there are roles for all who want to get involved as:

The goals of OSGrid are 1) to test OpenSim releases on a daily basis and 2) to build a healthy community.

Charles Krinke (avatar Charles Krinkeb), whom I met first in the OpenSim office hours, began running OSGrid in August with 150 users and a dozen regions. Others were brought in as managers, most notably “Nebadon Izumi”, “Hiro Protagonist”, “Paulie Flomar” and more in the Fall. “We now have 3200 users and nearly 400 regions attached as of early July, 2008,” Charles noted.

In the picture above, Hiro Protagonist (James Stallings in RL) and I are seated in Zaius Plaza, OSGrid (see also Hiro’s blog).

The Goals of OSGrid

Charles Krinke described the Goals of OSGrid in detail to me.

Goal 1: “Testing OpenSim releases”

There are several considerations here from a grid viewpoint. First and foremost is the fact that differing regions on OSGrid run on differing operating systems and with differing configurations. This includes both Windows and Linux servers running regions. Some regions run scripting with the dotnet script engine. Others run with xengine for scripting. Some regions use local assets, some grid assets. Regions running different operating systems and different configurations are right next to each other. Additionally two regions might be adjacent on the grid, but physically on opposite sides of the planet. Some are in colo-farms with fat pipes and some are in homes with modest cable modem connections.

Testing things like avatar appearance editing, script functionality (or lack thereof), region crossings, inventory usage all become important in a heterogeneous grid like this as we use a systems approach to testing and facilitating software development.

It is entirely appropriate to report at http://opensimulator.org/mantis bugs found in OpenSim regions on OSGrid particularly if these bugs can be confirmed on at least two regions running different operating systems. To the extent we can identify and replicate with a simple recipe problems in the software, it becomes easier for the core developers in OpenSim to fix these problems. OSGrid provides a fairly rich spectrum of region configurations to allow more bugs to be identified then with a single standalone of even a grid will all identical regions.

Goal 2: “Building more community”

Our “Plaza” regions all honor a different personality in OpenSim history. Each one is a little different. But each serve as seed regions to expand the mainland and folks wishing to connect regions to OSGrid are encouraged to attach to a face or corner of one of the plazas to help expand and fill in the gaps of our mainland. As we expand, there will be new plazas from time to time and all of them will have a unique personality.

All of our plazas run on donated, community servers and the OSGrid control operators administer the servers and encourage community builds, freebie zones, script demonstrations and the like. As time goes on, we establish more “Hours”, which are dedicated times set aside to discuss, learn, teach or demonstrate some aspect of using OpenSim.

Around the plazas are various personal, corporate and university regions. All of these regions are owned by their providers and not by OSGrid. Commercial activies are encouraged by those whose corporations put up regions. Other things such as artist colonies, homesteading areas and the like exist and are encouraged.

It is reasonable for organizations to build additional mainlands elsewhere on the grid. There is no requirement that all regions be near the existing mainland at 20000,20000. After all, OSGrid is intended to develop a diverse, global Metaverse and it certainly seems to be happening.

Folks are encouraged to donate original creations to the various freebie areas for others to get with the “Take Copy” option and use, modify and understand as they wish. Also there are a number of scripts on the forums at http://osgrid.org/forums for folks to use as they expand their scripting knowledge.

Today it is official, “The IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement” - see also, Torley Linden’s video here (screenshot above).

Hamilton Linden and Inifinty Linden visited OpenSim office hours in Wright’s Plaza, OSGrid, last week with some big news (screenshot below). 25 avatars gathered to discuss with great enthusiasm Hamilton Linden’s proposal that Linden Lab would provide an Open Beta for the Open Grid Protocol for login and teleport between OpenSim and the Linden Lab Public Open Grid Beta.

This interoperability work has been pioneered by David Levine (IBM researcher, Zha Ewry in Second Life) in conjunction with Linden Lab’s Architecture Working Group. Zha has personally coded the patch and she blogged her progress on this last month. Zha’s interop patch can be viewed here.

Later in this post for Zha’s gives an outline of the steps that could lead to the advent of much anticipated and hotly debated content interoperability.

Why is this Interoperability Initiative so important?

While, in Zha’s words, “this is a proof of concept of protocol.” It is an important first step, not only toward realizing Linden Lab’s dream of expanding the influence of their technology, but for consolidating a heterogenous mix of applications for virtual worlds in an interoperable environment.

Notably, it will allow corporations to deploy private and exploratory grids on OpenSim technology while remaining interoperable with the largest virtual world community to date, Linden Lab’s Second Life.

But it is not only interoperability between Second Life and OpenSim which will unleash the power of virtual worlds, it is interoperability between OpenSim grids. New OpenSim grids like Tribal Net and innovative projects like realXtend are beginning to discuss consolidating their influence through interoperability.

Both Tribal Net and realXtend have led the way re innovation with OpenSim technology (see my posts here, here, here for realXtend and here for Tribal Net). And, both are now in early discussions with OSGrid re interoperability. Charles Krinke, a developer and very excellent open source community organizer, runs OSGrid. He gave me a some background on OSGrid (see an upcoming post for more).

OSGrid is the second oldest OpenSim grid and was created in July, 2007. I began running it in August with 150 users and a dozen regions. Others were brought in as managers, most notably “Nebadon Izumi”, “Hiro Protagonist”, “Paulie Flomar” and more in the fall. We now have 3200 users and nearly 400 regions attached as of early July, 2008.

There are two goals for OSGrid. One is to test the OpenSim releases on a daily basis and the other is to build a healthy community.

Interoperability and consolidation of virtual worlds is vital to their development not only because Metcalfe’s law states that “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system” but because Second Life has demonstrated that one of the key contributions of Virtual Worlds so far is their potential to collapse geography (as Cory Ondrejka put it).

Open Virtual Worlds must continue to create new and richer forms of networked interaction, enabling the communication not only of personal identities, but of community identities and cultures in ways not possible or imagined before. This potential cannot be fulfilled by small isolated worlds.

A New Era for Virtual Worlds Begins!

The excitement was palable today in meetings held in Second Life and OpenSim that discussed moving the interoperability initiative forward.

Interoperability is a big deal. This much was clear. And the press were on it! Eric Reuters showed up in the OpenSim IRC today asking questions about IP and virtual economies in the Open Metaverse. And, there are many posts already including TechCrunch, Information Week, Virtual World News, Gamasutra, and Dusan Writer’s.

In the IBM press release, Colin Parris, Vice President, Digital Convergence, IBM said. “Developing this protocol is a key milestone and has the potential to push virtual worlds into the next stage of their evolution.”

The screenshot above is from OpenSim office hours today, Wright’s Plaza, OSGrid. There were 31 avatars present including Zha Ewry, avatar of David Levine, IBM, and at least four Lindens - Hamilton Linden, Tess Linden, Whump Linden, and Periapse Linden (Whump and Periapse are running the Linden Lab Public Open Beta Grid).

Also, there were many of the key OpenSim developers, Adam Johnson and Jeff Ames dropped in from Genkii, Japan (see here for more). There were several avatars from IBM in addition to Zha, and members of the Microsoft Development Community in OpenSim, notably G2 Proto, were there.

In the foreground of the screenshot above you can see the OpenSim avatar of Mic Bowman, Principal Engineer from Intel, Finrod Meriman. Mic is an important advocate for Interoperable Virtual Worlds and active member of the OpenSim development community. This was a power house gathering signalling interoperability as the future of virtual worlds has arrived.

Hamilton announced the link for the Public Open Grid Beta, and told the gathering:

You just need to contact Periapse or Whump Linden and they’ll get you setup. Although, we’re are officially committing to July 31st to start. But we’d obviously like to do it sooner. When it starts they’ll give you the info for the downloadable viewer and access to the Agent Domain Host.

Steps Towards Content Interoperability: Interview with Zha Ewry.

Interoperability will raise many new social/business questions for virtual worlds (particularly re content and business models). However, because this proof of concept is between the Linden Lab Public Open Grid Beta, which is not part of the Second Life economy, and OpenSim there is time for some of these questions to be explored.

This exploratory process began at a large meeting held by Zero Linden last week that focused on some of the community concerns about interoperability (see transcript here).

I asked Zha Ewry what she saw as the steps that would lead to content traveling back and forth between Second Life and OpenSim. The movement of content is where most of the thorny social/legal/business questions around interoperability emerge.

Zha outlined what the technical steps would be while noting that the social questions were just beginning to be explored:

Zha: There are a series of about four technical/social/legal steps.

First, we need a protocol for establishing proof of identity between
the components. ie for the sims and services to cross prove they are
who they claim to be, which is peer to having a trusted identity for
the users.

Second, we need a way of expressing policy This is orthogonal to one,
but pretty much requires the proof of identity in order to be useful.
In particular, we want to be able to express what the content creator
desires, including whether they wish it to be restricted to a grid, or
set of grids, copy and use and so on.

Third, we need an agreed public protocol for asset fetch including
both copy, and ACID fetch, and a reliable way of managing no-copy
assets. This is the brute work of moving the digital assets around,
and would exploit one and two to determine if assets should be movable
at all.

Fourth you would want the legal and social framework for using the
technical capabilities. This would be akin to a Terms of Service for
connecting stuff together, which would spell out what policies were in
place. effectively, these become the specific agreements which couple
the first three together, so that we have a safe, agreed way of moving
only the publically accessible assets (we can in fact, do parts of
this, in parallel, so we could work on 3) with public domain assets,
on a set of sims, that only had public assets) while working on 1 and
2.

A lot of this takes on a flavor of building up a layered set of
abilities, and then allowing people to compose a range of possible
solutions. At the protocol level, we want to allow a lot of
flexibility so different grids and communities can explore different
strategies. This is not about a one size fits all approach, or about
having a good enough crystal ball to pick an approach. An open source
community, with open protocols has the luxury of encouraging
experimentation.

Tish: So have the proof of identity protocols been published in any
current AWG docs or worked on?

Zha: It has been discussed, but not in any detail

Tish: So on the agenda?

Zha: Oh, very much so!

For an in depth and somewhat technical discussion of how issues of IP, trust, and managing permissions, licenses etc. might be managed with interoperable virtual worlds see the chatlog from todays Architectural Working Group Groupies discussion.

Content is already on the move in the Open Metaverse

Tribal Net announced this week that Second Inventory is now working on Tribal:

This software lets you backup and restore content to and from different grids, like for example the Second Life(tm) grid, and Tribal Net - which makes Tribal Net an excellent tool to work in private or offline with content, or to make and transfer objects thru e-mail or the web. (You can now distribute your Second Life(tm) object thru your blog - literally!)

Also Tribal annoinced they have 200 members, “and 150 of those has published their own islands. We now have a small core of dedicated 3D pioneers.”

They have also started a community micro-blogosphere that you might want to check out.

Ron Andrade of Common.Sensible has been checking Tribal out and has written a nice post about what he has found. He also notes re the integration of Tribal with Second Inventory that this is not opened the door to all kinds of content transfer or theft.

Now don’t panic, all you against-theft-aggregations and I. P. advocates. You can only copy your inventory and you must be using the same avatar name on Tribal Net as you are using in Second Life. All the permissions remain the same. So, creators, fear not: your hard work is safe. Well, every bit as safe as it currently is in Second Life. Although it is unknown how scripts and other things will react. But hey, if you are the adventurous type with the resources and time, give it a shot.

Stefan Andersson of Tribal noted we should remember “the pioneering and experimental aspect of inter-grid content transfer, and that people should expect some bumps in the road.”

The realXtend 0.3 release is out with a bunch of exciting new features! Click here or on the screenshot above to see the reX video.

Also, RealXtend launched a public avatar service - avatar.realXtend.net If you are interested you should sign up soon. Jani Pirkola, Project Manager for realXtend, told me:

We will get 100 first in to test our worlds and systems and give feedback for us. The limit is because we don’t want to drown if there are too many people.

I signed up on Friday and tried out a number of the innovations including the avatar generator and the teleport that allows your avatar to move between different reX worlds. Also, I used the inworld skype to chat with the reX team. The friend list is now global, meaning that regardless which realXtend world you are in, you can see the online status of your friends. And, if you already have skype installed on your pc you can call other people from the world. Just right click them and select “call” from the menu. realXtend also have their own voice application in development. Jani explained some more about the Skype integration:

If the other person wants, he can also define his real phone number as his contact info, then your skype call will be routed to his mobile phone, for example. realXtend welcomes all millions of skype users to virtual worlds!

In the picture below I am creating Tish Shute (my avatar in reX) in the avatar generator. There is a selection clothes that are real 3D meshes and they adjust to your body. Also reX has added new male and female models and a lot of skins and clothes for them. You can adjust their muscularity and body “fat” and create really nice looking characters.

The speed at which relXtend has been bringing out new features has already begun to attract a lot of interest. Many reX innovations do not exist yet in other virtual worlds, and a dynamic community of developers is beginning to gather in the realXtend Google discussion group. As the content creation tools improve, the new features will, I suspect, begin to catch the attention of content providers.

Jani noted:

The workflow to make more clothes is still quite painful, you need to use a handful of tools to accomplish a good cloth. We will put instructions on how to make clothes on our website when they are ready. I think some content providers should get interested. Making the skins is easier. And if you use Facegen, you can get really nice looking faces and heads for an avatar. It is still possible to use the bone system to scale parts of avatars bigger or smaller and to create something totally different, like godzilla sized avatars. They are awesome!

You can also download the Facegen software on the rex site and after you have generated your 3D likeness use it in the avatar generator. There will be a “how to” on the site soon. But obviously the reX team have been using FaceGen already and Peter Quirk figured it out himself. The picture above is of reX founder Juha Hulkko. I met Juha in reX, Friday, chatting with the reX team just prior to the launch.

Realxtend are using the IKAN (”Inverse Kinematics Using Analytical Methods” from the University of Pennsylvania. Jani Pirkola, Project Manager for realXtend commented:

IKAN was by the time we found it licensed “free for non-commercial use” which is incompatible with GPL license we use because of the Linden Viewer. However, they were very nice and provided the IKAN for us (and thus for everyone) as GPL. So big thanks to IKAN!

There is future development planned for the Inverse Kinematics as on its own it doesn’t deliver very natural movement:

IK movements look a bit awkward as they are but if you could use IK to partly control the keyframe animation that would be good. That is something we don’t have. But now that the IK system is in place, it is the natural next step. Did you see our task list for 2H 2008? I think there was something said about making IK feature complete.

Virtual worlds pioneer, Peter Quirk of No There There has done an extensive exploration of the new release including “how to exploit the Google 3D warehouse to find models and create Ogre meshes from them. As Peter notes the version is marked alpha code so the reX team are looking for feedback and making improvements all the time.

I did successfully teleport over to the ENSAD sim (being developed by Professor François Garnier and students of Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs de Paris) with a couple of the reX team members during my visit!

Modular Integration of realXtend Innovation into OpenSim

There has been some concern (see Justin Clark-Casey and Dusan Writer) about the integration of reX code into OpenSim.

Jani Pirkola told me that the idea for modular integration originally came when chatting with Adam Frisby about OpenSim philosophy, “that it could be a generic engine for any kind of viewer.”

Jani explained:

The idea of the modules came up because originally realXtend did many of the changes directly to OpenSim core, which is not a good way to do changes. Instead it is much cleaner to do them into modules that can be loaded on demand.

For example, the realXtend viewer could have its own protocol plugin called clientstack at OpenSim and that way it won’t interfere with SL Viewer.

I was interested to know some more about whether the idea of a build tree and mix and match plugins was already a part of OpenSim’s design. This kind of flexibilty to add or drop different features to builds according to different applications is necessary to accommodate the vast amount of innovation that needs to go on to figure out which are going to be killer apps in the future

I talked to Adam Frisby (one of the founders of OpenSim and CTO of Deep Think), Zha Ewry (IBM) and Justin Clark-Casey (IBM), about the integration of realXtend’s innovations as modules/plugins. OpenSim architecture is pretty good already for implementing mix and match plugins and “to make plugins deeper and richer” is one of the key goals. Adam pointed out OpenSim “is already doing core functionality as plugins - teleports are handled as plugins, and instant messaging and chat certainly are.”

Adam noted there many exciting possibilities that mix and match builds could create for OpenSim:

Adam Frisby: It would nice say to take the meshes from reX and say the set up and easy way to get a sim on line from Tribal, and you mix that with plain OpenSim and you have a fantastic combination.

Zha Ewry: And it is going to be that kind of evolution - we are going to cherry pick from the fifty or sixty creative things the four of five things which turn out to be killer apps. This is how open source projects win or die.

Zha Ewry: Increasingly there is no good reason why everything you do shouldn’t sit into either region code or the modular plug in code. Occasionally we are going to find that you can’t factor a bit of code out because there is some piece of the core that hasn’t been exposed right and then we are going to have to go and do that.

Tish Shute: And how does this model work for interoperability?

Zha Ewry: The Interoperability is almost entirely plugable. There are two or three bits that aren’t at the moment because of the way they entwine deep in… some of that is a matter of figuring out how to do it right and some of it requires a discussion on how we want to manage a couple of messy issues, e.g. what does it mean to host an avatar that is not authenticated by a local authentication? How do we want to handle that data structure? But there is absolutely no reason why the ability to inter operate wouldn’t be done as regions and plug code.

Just to give one example, when we figure out how we are going to fetch assets from off of Linden Lab’s asset server that is going to look like something that plugs in to the asset framework. ie. instead of gong to MySQL, we have a plugin that goes and fetches assets stored on a remote grid.

All of this functionality needs to be done in a way that can be factored as much as possible. So that you can say, I want this from this tree, this from this tree, I want to be able to fetch assets, I want to use the currency module from this tree, and that so that can produce an OpenSim with this set of features. You may be only able to get it with say these three clients but that is what you need and those are the clients that can work with what you need.

Adam explained that the goal is to put the entire realXtend functionality as plug ins on top of OpenSim as very discrete modules, e.g, a module for doing the meshes, a module for their voice chat, their avatar logins, but the goal is to be able to take these and mix and match them with everything else.

I asked Justin to comment when I saw him in the OpenSim Office Hours meeting in Wright’s Plaza, OSGrid, a packed meeting that included Hamilton and Tess Linden and a dynamic discussion on interoperability between the Linden Lab grid and OpenSIm. See Zha Ewry’s blog post, “Happy Jumping Ruths…..Interop takes a step,” to see just how far this work on interoperability between OpenSim and the Linden Lab grid has come!

Justin Clark-Casey: I think that when OpenSim and realXtend first met, there was an intention that realXtend would be integrating all the features and fixes they produced directly into OpenSim.

My motivation for writing my original post was really as an update to the situation as it had started out in February. Though it did prove too difficult, in the end, to integrate their code, I still think they could have spent some development time extracting basic core bug fixes and sending them to us - we really have received no code from them.

This is fine in itself - there’s a very good argument that value-add code should exist as external plugins and shouldn’t make it into the OpenSim core. It just frustrates me somewhat that people talk about doing stability fixes (as realXtend did in one of your interviews) and then don’t spend time to contribute them back them back.

Regarding modularity, this has been one of the core aims of OpenSim for a long time. We want to produce a generally useful platform and not just a Second Life server. I think the vision that Adam has outlined is workable, though I think our module code has quite a lot of evolution to go through yet. But it’s good that realXtend have contracted Adam’s company to do this - Adam certainly knows what he’s doing and the requirements that realXtend have should mean that some time will be spent on developing the module system within OpenSim. In this way, realXtend will be (albeit indirectly) contributing to OpenSim.

Just to be clear, from my understanding of what Adam has said, the new realXtend modules themselves will not be distributed with OpenSim. I’m assuming that instead realXtend will make a seperate distribution of OpenSim core + their modules.

Adam concurred that the Rex code will be not be merged with OpenSim and on the opensim tracker, only the improvements to OpenSim core will be. The Rex modules will be distributed by Rex themselves only.

Much of the coding for the integration of realXtend’s new code with OpenSim will be done in Deep Think’s new Shanghai office. But Adam will handle the integration plug ins to the OpenSim trunk personally. Plugins into different build options will enable, for example, taking a piece from RealXtend, taking a piece from Tribal, taking a piece from DeepThink, mashing it together with OpenSim-Core, and producing a usable result.

Adam noted:

The code we’re doing for Rex makes that possible with their components, and hopefully lets us improve the core at the same time to make it support other peoples work in the same manner.

Yesterday I visited IBM 7 in Second Life to see what Ian Hughes, IBM (Epredator Potato in Second Life) has been doing with his Wimbledon project this year. In the picture above, Tara5 Oh, my avatar in Second Life, is in the IBM Wimbledon team control room reconstructed in SL from panoramic photos. Click on the image below to see the whole panorama in Flash.

My timing was good because I not only met up with Epredator and got to play his new “Rock, Paper, Scissors tennis game (see picture below). But, I also got to talk to Judge Hocho, the IBMer who Epredator noted did much of the work on the build this year. Also there was Laronzo Fitzgerald who worked on the build last year. Even the legendary Jessica Qin (one of IBMs most talented architects in SL) flew in briefly to tweak a telehub. But she was “slammed” with work, unfortunately, so she couldn’t stop to play tennis and drink Pimms.

Enjoying Prims Pimms

As Epredator has illustrated with a video on eightbar some very funny cross purpose conversation that occurred during my tour of Wimbledon in Second Life! Pimms, a specialty English drink that is a tradition at Wimbledon, kept cropping up in the conversation. But prims, as we know, are the basic building blocks of Second Life. For a while I was struggling to work out why Judge and Epredator wanted me to visit the virtual Wimbledon roof garden to share some Pimms “prims.”

Well I had prims on the brain not Pimms. I had been admiring the good use Epredator has put Linden Lab’s “html on a prim” to. But as you can see below I did finally get to enjoy a Pimms on the roof garden that again makes nice use of panoramic photos to capture the beauty of this spot.

Judge does not blow his own horn and it took me a while and a few roof top Pimms to find out Judge is also Lead Architect for the division of IBM that handles the infrastructure on the Wimbledon project.

The infrastructure for the IBM Wimbledon web site is cool in and of itself. Judge explained some of the more gearheady details:

Judge Hocho: We use multiple sites in a failure avoidance capacity, rather than the standard failure recovery. It’s something we developed here, wherein we only need 150% capacity, instead of the typical 200% for recovery which is why we have had IBM.com running at 100% since June of 2001.

Tara5: What kinds of load does it handle?

Judge Hocho: we can handle a metric ton of load

Tara5 Oh: What does that mean?

Judge Hocho: heh, millions of requests per min!

Epredator Potato: Last year, we had 266,311,332 page views for the event.

HTML on Pimms a Prim

Epredator Potato showed me how the present capabilites of HTML on a Prim in SL, that include live updating, do provide nice presentation tools.

Epredator: if you press play like you would for a movie. You will see the website on the large monitor in the corner. You can click the monitor to get slected pages. The Linden browser on a prim is not fully active. But it runs things

You see the webpage?

Well I have been using this to demonstrate how to interact with existing content. While the links dont work we can change the url, just like videos and hence let you have control. You will see the clock is ticking and working. And, we have a wimbledon twitter channel now too, so when I do demos, I can direct this web to anything.

The HTML on a prim is read only but, if you have a fixed structure on a page you can make the surface buttons clickable until we have full browser [more about LL's plans for this below].

Full browsing is complicated, so there isn’t a full browser capability yet. But its not just graphics. Like if we run twitter vision because you can change the URL. Well this [the Twitter vision page above] is an active webpage running live. They dont do flash but they do do ajax style. It is a webpage. it is a browser just with clicking turned off. So it is running javascript on your machine. It is very nice as a presentation tool.

“WebKit Meta: A new standard for in-game web content”

I pinged Qarl Linden who has been working on Linden Lab’s web rendering project while I was admiring the IBM Wimbledon web presentation board. And Qarl Linden concurred that even though the current html on a prim is not fully dynamic yet, you can for instance, if you use an ajax based white-boarding software, see the whiteboard update live on the prim.

But Qarl also mentioned there are some very interesting plans afoot for using webkit as our web renderer because “we’re having trouble getting mozilla to properly handle plugins (flash, java, etc).”  You can read more about that progress here:

After admiring the Web presentation tools I tried my hand at Judge’s server game. Judge (seated below) seemed rather underwhelmed at my serving skills! But I highly recommend an outing to Wimbledon in Second Life. And, for updates on what is going check in on the eightbar blog.

Screen shot from realXtend’s wickedly cool avatar tech demo (see video here).

Some people may have walked away from Virtual Worlds 2008, NYC, thinking the vision of the metaverse has boiled down to two notions: 1) every toy should have its own own virtual world and 2) may a thousand walled gardens flourish. But, if you did come away thinking that, you missed out on another important current at the conference - the rapid growth of the open metaverse and the excitement of developers, architects and visionaries who are exploring its potential.

The discussion at the Open Source Virtual Worlds Round Table included so many of the key players, including Philip Rosedale, and covered such a big chunk of issues that that I have transcribed it and published it at the end of this post - the audio is here. The audio quality is poor (except for the round table facilitators from OpenSim, Sun’s Project Wonderland, Qwaq and myself as we were sitting right on top of my ipod!) So, I hope the transcription of the discussion will be useful to all those involved in pioneering the open source metaverse.

The dichotomy of visions - an open metaverse or a thousand walled gardens - present at VW 2008 did not escape the very savvy virtual world writer Wagner James Au (Hamlet Au in Second Life) who narrates this tale of two conferences on GigaOm, here and here. Hamlet, author of The Making of Second Life, and part of metaversal thinking from the early days is in unique position to understand the accomplishments and vagaries of its prodigal children.

The inadequacies of the short term constrained visions that held the main stage at Virtual Worlds 2008 were also commented on by Cory Ondrejka, one of the founders and former CTO of Linden Lab who wrote on his blog:

Is this really the Metaverse? Is this even the 3D internet? Isn’t this the same week that we saw Congressional testimony on virtual worlds, on their potential impact on education, community, business, and communication? Technology is just enabling us to take incredibly bold steps, to connect people in entirely new ways. From 3D camera technology to spatialized voice to novel interfaces to mobile to augmented reality, we should be ready to embark on the next exponential curve, building on everything learned from Second Life over the last 8 years.

Not game over by a long shot - the party has just started!

The young guns are working with the open source and reverse engineered derivatives of Second Life to explore the full potential of avatar presence in a 3D, interactive, dynamic, networked environment. And this is just the very beginning.

On 3rd of April the OpenSim platform was load tested with the amazing Antigone (top image), who sang live in OpenSim in an event sponsored by the Sine Wave Company (boardwalk leading to the stage in OpenSim above).

And, if you were thinking that Philip Rosedale stepping down as CEO of Linden Lab was a sign that Philip was giving up a leadership role in the future of the open metaverse, think again. Philip’s continuing deep engagement with the technical and business challenges of the Open Metaverse was quite clear when he showed up and sparked off an intense discussion at the Open Source Virtual Worlds Round Table.

In this picture, Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab, Zafka Zhang of HiPiHi, Wagner James Au (author of The Making of Second Life), Tess Linden, Eilif Trondsen of SRI Consulting Business Intelligence are just some of the metarati at the round table.

Also very visible at Virtual Worlds 2008 was Cory Ondrejka. And while Cory is now consulting on a wide range of entrepreneurial, technology, and innovation projects, he has a tremendous amount of domain knowledge about the design, architecture, and scaling challenges of virtual worlds. And, as I saw Cory chatting with the new kids on the block, I found myself thinking, how interesting it was that his experience was actually on the open market at this critical juncture for open source virtual worlds. (But Cory did hint to me that he may not be as free to consult in the near future.)

Cory noted in a brief chat after the conference that there are a lot of potential stumbling blocks for Second Life competitors and the aspirant architects of the Open Metaverse face challenges linked to design (repeating failures from the late ’90s), architecture (given target market and use, are you picking the correct technologies?), and scaling (do any aspects of your design require vertical scaling? what are the choke points?). Cory will be writing up more of his thoughts about some of this on his blog, I think.

What is the architecture of the Open Metaverse?

Picture from Nicole Yankelovich of Sun Microsystems Wonderland blog post - from left to right, Remy Malan, Qwaq, Nicole, me, Jani Pirkola, realXtend, Adam Frisby OpenSim, Adam Johnson, Genkii.

The power of virtual worlds for business collaboration was the emphasis of Sun and Qwaq’s presentation during the Open Source Virtual Worlds round table. Nicole Yankelovich demoed Project Wonderland’s multiple group voice chat that cleverly simulates “watercooler chitchat” that real-world office spaces provide and impressive telephony that allows users to communicate in or out of the virtual world space by phone (See Nicole’s blog and Hamlet’s write up on GigaOm here for more). But the discussion centered on the open metaverse as something akin to the next generation internet where business, consumers, communities and the individuals and organizations of public life have the possibility to interconnect and interact as well as stay behind firewalls. And the voices for this vision came from the open source initiatives with their roots in the Linden Lab Second Life technology.

Topics discussed were:

What is the business model for Linden Lab in the open metaverse? (Philip gave the most clear and convincing explanation of this I have heard.)

How will forking not become an issue and break up the open metaverse before it has begun?

Will the open metaverse have a virtual currency?

How can truly wicked avatars using blended animation and inverse kinematics be deployed without choking performance?

How will IP be protected and will obfustication be employed?

How will asset/content development flourish in the open metaverse?

The latter question included a discussion about different models of content production and content monetization in virtual worlds including new ideas like the open source content project of Clever Zebra. For info on their upcoming vBusiness expo see here.

I relayed a couple of questions from Peter Quirk, EMC, who unfortunately couldn’t attend the conference. Peter’s questions produced some excellent discussion and responses.

1) Is the lack of useful assets to populate a world, whether it’s OpenSim, Croquet or Wonderland the number one business issue?

2) Instead of driving to a complete implementation of LSL, has OpenSim gone off in open source fragmentation land inventing their own scripting extensions which are guaranteed to cause problems going in the other direction?

If you are interested in any of these questions you may want to study this transcript that includes lengthy comments from Philip Rosedale (Linden Lab), Adam Frisby (OpenSim), David Levine (IBM) - Zha Ewry in Second Life, Jani Pirkola (realXtend), Christian Westbrook of WelloHorld, and several other key architects of the open metaverse.

What’s New?
Enterprise Applications in Open Source Virtual Worlds?

I moderated two enterprise round tables at Virtual Worlds 2008, one on Open Source Virtual Worlds and one on Enterprise Applications and the discussion at both was driven by key innovators in these areas.

The Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in Fall 2008 will have a full on enterprise track Chris Sherman says. But the “knights of the enterprise round table” gave us taste last week of what is to come.

It was fascinating to hear Michael Osias from IBM and Oliver Goh from Eolus and who are pioneering enterprise command and control centers for building automation, green data centers, energy and facility management debate with Mark Phillips from the Simulation Business Unit of MASA Group Inc.

“What’s new?” about these enterprise applications on OpenSim, asked Mark Philips who works at the very highest end of business simulation. It is true, from the perspective of the lofty budgets that high end business simulation is accustomed to, command and control centers in 3D environments are nothing new. But Michael and Mark who have worked together in the past did come to agree that never before has this kind of software been accessible for cheap and rapid protoyping/development/and deployment in this way and with the potential to be used both inside and outside of firewalls in both in secure and massively networked environments.

Virtual worlds for children maybe a marketers utopia/cornucopia but the open metaverse is still the most exciting social and technical paradigm shift since the mass adoption of the internet.

A New Era of Business Tools and Business Process Modeling

Melanie Swan from MS Futures, one of the facilitators of the Enterprise Applications round table described how open source data visualization tools will open a new era for business tools that have given us little that is new in recent years.

And Ben Lindquist of Green Phosphor described how virtual worlds will be more than collaborative spaces they will become where business processes are modeled on an ongoing basis within the enterprise.

What I see happening is knowledge workers, analysts, middle management, spending time in a virtual space modeling the actual business that they do and doing that on a continual basis.

Imagine a network of pipes and other objects that actually represents your business processes, your organizational model, your supply chain; and you can see your people working on it in the virtual world. They’ll be able to perform “what if” scenarios - answering questions such as “what if we combine these two offices - what does it do to responsiveness”, and then when a change works well in the model, it can be implemented in the real world through integration with the ERP system.

IBM’s big news at the conference was that they would be working with Second Life behind their firewall. But with 6000 plus IBMers in Second Life and a working interest in interoperability issues, it is common knowledge that IBM gets the open metaverse and its potential. Perhaps what is more surprising than the news of Second Life being experimented with on IBM blade servers is that this collaboration hadn’t happened sooner. For more insights on what the IBM behind the firewall project is about read David Levine’s (Zha Ewry in Second Life) post here.

Transcript of Discussion at the Open Source Virtual Worlds Round Table

Philip Rosedale (LL): Blended animation and IK (Inverse Kinematics) is a really cool thing it’s also a really hard problem, I would love to see progress on that. Its got to be one of thing to make the world really ??. We wanted to do that from the very beginning. Its a daunting problem of course. You’re simultaneously having to use the animation in-world as a kind of a mechanical guide to move what is supposed to be a mechanical hand, and the problem is there’s a lot of corner cases where trying to do that with an animation kind of won’t work. In the same way that say break your arm you can’t put it anywhere, you run into this interesting problem. But I have to say that I think that is a great piece of work. It is one of the things that in my personal opinion it’s one of the key elements of believability that the avatar lacks today that we essentially have this odd situation where we have a little bit of physics going on the avatar bumping into things and getting up on a table and then all the animations are happening without any respect for the kinetics of the environment so its a very hard problem and I’d love to see some work being done on it.

We love to work on it! But it is a question of having the people..

(for more click on “read entire post” for the rest of this transcript)
(more…)

HiPiHi is taking up the challenge of building a managed world with the emphasis on creating a strong virtual economy and a community built around the trading and creation of virtual goods, just at the moment when Linden Lab is beginning to make serious moves to an open grid (see here, here, and here).

While HiPiHi will not focus on real life integrations or enterprise applications, they will provide APIs for enterprises to do that themselves. They will be using the Chinese micro payment system Alipay, by alibaba which unlike PayPal does not have prohibitive costs for micro transactions.

IBM is a “solutions provider” for HiPiHi helping them design a systems architecture that will facilitate running a scalable world with a strong virtual economy. The early focus of HiPiHi is on building an architecture to support the virtual economy.

Toshitaka Jiku, HiPiHi’s new CTO and Executive Vice-President notes: “Virtual goods will be housed in a server for the purpose of creating a market place that will be our vision for an ebay for virtual worlds, so these virtual goods would be portable as opposed to having avatars being portable first.” IBM is also working with Linden Lab in the Architectural Working Group (see earlier post) on scaling and interoperability for Second Life and interoperability and avatar portability is part of the long term vision for HiPiHi.

And, HiPiHi is partnering with Intel to tap more CPU power. It has often been noted that one of the weaknesses of all current game engines and virtual worlds is they do not tap the power of the new CPUs.

HiPiHi has only 40,000 users so the focus of the public beta, which began April 2nd, will be on community building. While they have a future vision of interoperability with Second Life and other platforms based on the Linden Lab technology, the focus, for now, is on building a Chinese community. But they are experimenting with a dual naming system with avatars bearing English and Chinese names because international communication is very much in the HiPiHi vision of the future.

While HiPiHi plans for some mobile integration early on, IMing friends and inventory management for example, the emphasis at the moment is building the community inworld (also note Second Life’s recent integration with mobile, “Samsung Unveils Second Life..” ). But Toshitaka Jiku, HiPiHi’s new CTO is one of the first to develop a mobile interface for SL. And, Jiku comes from NGI the Venture Capital company that is also backing 3Di, so look for interesting innovation with mobile integration in the future.

While HiPiHi is commonly seen as a mere Second Life clone, the work they are doing with IBM and Intel on the system architecture is hoped to produce some valuable innovation. They are also researching the innovations of realXtend’s client. HiPiHi has a close relationship with OpenSim through their connection to 3Di and with Adam Fisby’s company, Deep Think, that is opening offices in Shanghai. It will be interesting to see how these relationship develop over time. Xu Hui and Philip Rosedale met last year and there is a long term vision of cooperation possible. These connections if they blossomed into cooperation and full interoperability would create a very interesting step forward for positive global development through virtual worlds.

Interview With Xu Hui, CEO of HiPiHi

Xu Hui, CEO of HiPiHi with Toshitaka Jiku, HiPiHi’s new CTO and Executive Vice-President

Bjorn Lee, Senior Manager, Marketing & International Business Development for HiPiHi, did an excellent job of translating for this interview, not only with Chinese and English but with the skillful and patient way he worked with me to find the essence of some of my long stream of consciousness questions! Bjorn also contributed many insights, and Toshitaka Jiku stopped by with some interesting insights into HiPiHi’s direction.

Tish Shute: Please could you tell me about your vision for the future of virtual worlds?

Xu Hui: The global virtual world industry will be undergoing a revolution over the next few years. What HiPiHi, Second Life and the other virtual worlds have done in the past few years has really been just setting the stage, exposing the world and educating on the possibilities - kind of like a proof of concept for what virtual worlds can do and can’t do. The goal this year for most virtual platforms will be to build system architectures that can truly scale for a massively-concurrent user base, in addition to inter-operability.

Tish Shute: I know that HiPiHi has formed a patnership with IBM. Could you tell me more about this?

Xu Hui: We are working very closely with IBM in terms of building new technical infrastructure for our platform. What this means is that we will specifically be collaborating very closely on aspects such as redesigning our architecture.

Tish Shute: RealXtend has been working on interoperability of virtual worlds with “real life” and working on meshes and facilitating 3D imports. Have you been in contact with realXtend yet?

Xu Hui: We are actively researching what realXtend is doing, as with other exciting virtual world technologies; and will seriously considering integrating them with our new system architecture.

Tish Shute: What is the strategy of HiPiHi re building a community of content developers?

Xu Hui: This is one of the focuses for HiPiHi this year. We are looking into incentive systems for content creation, including monetary and non-monetary forms. For the former, our approach will be to facilitate universal trade and have a secondary market for people to exchange their virtual goods, their creations, their applications, and so on. But in China, the model will be slightly different initially as we favor an ecosystem approach where we work with third-party providers of virtual economy functions and services. An example could be in payment systems, where instead of reinventing the wheel, we could explore ways to facilitate transactions conducted through Alipay, often regarded as the Paypal for China.

Tish Shute: I am a Mac user and, of course, I am really interested to know when there will be a Mac Interface and easy to use english version?

Bjorn Lee: I am a fellow Mac user too, along with an increasing number of colleagues. So do rest assured we have an internal Mac evangelist team! Since December, we have had a very basic English version but our lack of bilingual staff has affected the development of a satisfactory support system, not to mention interface only for English users.

Tish Shute: How big is the market in China for Mac?

Bjorn Lee: It is about 1%. But of course it is out of a larger population base here in China. Despite their relative lack of scale among China users, Mac users here are very enthusiastic, grassroots, and very tightly knit. Macbook Air ads are playing heavily across Beijing too and have garnered strong brand awareness among the younger set of Chinese consumers.

Tish Shute: What are some of the goals for the public beta which is starting in early April?

Xu Hui: The Public Beta will begin April 2. For public beta what’s interesting is this dual naming system that we are developing for the very first time. The first phase is for the current Private Beta users to migrate to the new naming system before we release that naming system to the public.

We expect a fair amount of proactive user feedback in the initial days, as with all things new. But I think it’s a good step forward because it will try to bring together the English and the Chinese speaking worlds. In a “first” for the virtual world, this new naming system displays both your English (that we call international name) and your Chinese name on top of your avatar. Across many in-world interactions such as chat, social networking, and for future commerce , we are trying to break down the language barrier in the virtual world.

But we are trying to do something to move forward in trying to foster multi-cultural interaction, with the foreign audience and local Chinese audience. Because there’s a lot of demand from local audiences here who want to internationalize and meet people from overseas and the same feedback is coming from our foreign users such as Suezanne C. Baskerville who seems very keen on learning some Chinese. She would like to put some Chinese and English on her avatar too - it’s like a social “code”, you start putting Chinese words in your avatar and so you say that you know I’m friendly and I’m willing to speak to Chinese users. And so too for the Chinese because with the English names up there it doesn’t look so foreign to the foreign audience.

In the later part of the year after our new system architecture is up, we will begin to consider micro payment systems. But because we are migrating to this new infrastructure, the initial stages of the public beta will just be to get more people to use the tools and continue to gather feedback.

Tish Shute: “What is the business model for HiPiHi?”

Xu Hui: Our platform is oriented more for the individual users, that is the residents as opposed to the enterprises and the corporate residents. A lot of the features we are adding and a lot of the feedback that we’re taking is user centric. But, as for our relationship with corporate residents, we will be opening a series of programs and that includes opening our API to allow development on our platform by the enterprises. We think of it as a self-service approach, in the form of open APIs and maybe incentive programs for enterprises to kind of drive this for themselves. But we will design and customize the platform more according to our core user group which are the non-corporate users.

Tish Shute: What is HiPiHi’s relation to other virtual world initiatives, e.g., Entropia’s and other virtual world start ups in China?

Xu Hui: My starting point in responding to this is the definition of a virtual worlds in our company’s opinion is an open-ended user-directed environment. User-directed means that users would drive the content creation, the development of not just their own content, but also feed back to the company, and what they hope to see on a platform level. Open-ended also in the sense that they can have a freer rein in creating and managing their creations.

Concerning that kind of concept, as it plays right now in China, we are the only company that really does that. A lot of the other initiatives that have sprouted recently from the interested companies or other startups in this space have more of what we classify as virtual communities which means that they place real limits and constraints on the users ability to create, and actually have more control over their lifestyles in these worlds.

We will welcome other players as they enter too. We actually welcome the entry of others into this ecosystem because it helps this ecosystem grow and mature faster. And, it can only be good for the users to have so many different companies push out their products and try to reach out to them. So it’s good because then they’ll be able to make an intelligent choice and see how fulfilling a virtual lifestyle they want.

Tish Shute: How do you plan to expand beyond China and how will HiPiHi differ in other countries? I know Linden Lab has met some interesting legal challenges as they have expanded globally.

Xu Hui: HiPiHi will be the sole platform operator for China. As for regions outside China we will take a partnership approach to finding local companies which will then operate this platform. They will be licensed and hence operate this world on our behalf. Thus they will be entitled to benefits commercially and so will have to be responsible to bear the legal costs and challenges. This will reduce the amount of legal burden on our side. A US based operator of the HiPiHi platform in US will certainly have to follow US laws to be entitled to collect revenues but also they will have to handle US based law suits.

Tish Shute: Will HiPiHi have a strong ID verification system tying virtual identities to real identities as a way to try and control griefers etc?

Xu Hui: This question itself doesn’t address how we think about identity. First, we are not going to have a very strong link between real world identity and virtual identity because we feel that our focus would really be to improve accreditation of what is popularly known as a reputation system for virtual identities. So we will focus on building an attractive incentive program for avatars to view their virtual identities in our virtual world as opposed to saying that you’re going to tie this virtual identity very tightly to your real identity.

We want to create mechanisms to facilitate and encourage residents to improve their in-world reputation. But it doesn’t mean we’re not going to manage disruptive behavior such as griefing, which is already known to create problems for virtual worlds like Second Life.

We will have a monitoring mechanism for these troublemakers in our virtual world. But our intention is to let the actual policing be done by residents themselves, through self-organized groups and features we provide for them. .

Tish Shute: The next generation of the Linden Lab grid architecture will separate avatar identity from what constitutes their environment. Will you be going in this direction too.

Toshitaka Jiku: (HiPiHi’s new CTO) Our server architecture will have a different focus. Our server architecture picks out virtual goods as an item that we will separate from the others in the sense that we are going to place them on different servers first. So virtual goods will be housed in a server for the purpose of creating a market place that will be our vision for an “ebay for virtual worlds”, so these virtual goods would be portable as opposed to having avatars being portable first. These are just our first steps and it does also mean that avatars would be housed in a separate server. But the focus right now is to make virtual goods portable and enable the virtual economy.

Tish Shute: How is HiPiHi going to deal with issues of protecting IP rights? This issue has become quite a difficult one in Second Life.

Xu Hui: This is a very big question. I am just going to lay out some basic principals. We like the concepts of giving back the rights of a media creation and returning it back to the creator, enhancing the motivation and incentive systems for people to share their creations and so on. A lot of our influences come from Creative Commons - that is the first part. The second part is when IP rights are infringed we understand where we stand in the whole legislative environment. We are not a legislative body, nor can we judge or rule on certain issues of conflict. Hence what we can do as platform is to provide the data but when it comes to actually making decisions in the legislative environment we are going to rely on third-party intermediaries. This could involve bringing in real-world law makers and courts to uphold some of these IP right because we can’t do that ourselves. So we do face limits somewhat similar to Second Life.

Tish Shute: What are your goals with IBM and Intel?

Xu Hui: IBM to us is really a solutions company. They have expertise in almost every single aspect of the IP sector which makes them a very good partner for us because we considering the architecting of our systems across all areas, client, the backend, algorithms and so on. They can help because they are pretty broad in their understanding of all IP areas.

But Intel has a little bit more focus. Intel is the father of the CPU. They are still the best right now in their understanding of CPU performance and we believe they are going to continue to lead this sector. So when we work with them it is going to evolve around the understanding of the CPU unit - what kind of features and abilities are we able to extract and are going to be useful for virtual worlds. I think this is something many virtual worlds have not focused on - that is extracting value from the CPU. And where better to find out how than from the makers themselves which is Intel. So we work across a broad spectrum with IBM, but with Intel we work in the vertical, and we drill very very deep.