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Content Tagged with lab + Web2.0
Philip Rosedale Doesn’t See Browser-Based Virtual Worlds As A Threat to Second Life. Is He In Denial?
Recently, there’s been a growing wave of startups and products appearing that are bringing 3-D virtual worlds to the browser. These include Vivaty, Google’s Lively project, and the Electric Sheep Co.’s WebFlock. And I’ve seen a few stealth companies working the same vein.
None of these are as fully featured or immersive as Second Life, which requires a separate desktop client download. But it may not matter because a good-enough experience available via standard browsers may eventually qwn Second Life. Linden Lab, which operates Second Life, is working with IBM and others to make virtual worlds interoperable with each other. Still, for the most part, they don’t play nicely with the Web.
Last week I caught Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale on video at Fortune’s Brainstorm conference in Half Moon Bay, and asked him if Second Life is threatened by browser-based virtual worlds. In the video above, he argues that the browser is not yet ready to deliver the type of experience that you can get in Second Life. He does acknowledge that virtual worlds need to be opened up and standardized. But he doesn’t see the browser as a viable alternative to client-based virtual worlds any time soon.
Is he right, or is he in denial?
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IBM And Second Life Announce Interoperability, But Bridging Virtual Worlds Is the Wrong Answer
Virtual worlds like Second Life have a silo issue—they are virtual worlds unto themselves. Today, Linden Lab (which operates Second Life) and IBM announced that they have successfully bridged two virtual worlds, with avatars from Second Life successfully “teleporting” to an entirely different metaverse based on an OpenSim server.
The two companies have been working together on the Open Grid Protocol to allow for interoperability between virtual worlds. In a post on the Second Life blog, Hamilton Linden explains:
An open standard for interoperability based on the Open Grid Protocol would allow users to cross freely from one world to another, just as they can go from one Web site to another on the Internet today.
Here’s a video showing the avatars “teleporting” from one world (i.e. set of computer servers) to another:
Interoperability between virtual worlds is fine, and is definitely a step towards breaking down the walled gardens they are increasingly finding themselves in. But ultimately it is the wrong answer. What we really need is interoperability between virtual worlds and the Web.
Otherwise, virtual worlds will remain isolated in their alternate universe. If you can’t link to it from the regular Web (and vice versa), it doesn’t exist. That is why virtual 3D worlds are going to come to the browser. One startup, Vivaty (which launched in public beta earlier today), is already creating these browser-based virtual environments, where each place and object is a regular URL.
These still pale in comparison to what you can do in Second Life, but they will get better. And being connected to the rest of the Web will ensure that they never have any interoperability issues. The Web will just become more 3D over time. Will Second Life join the Web, or will its legacy architecture (built when there was no other choice) prevent it from doing so?
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