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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.