Your2ndPlace

Konner McDonnell was kind enough to email me a few links to look at regarding yesterday's news of the successful teleportation between Second Life and OpenSim. While, at a simple technical level, this is no big deal - logging an avatar onto a secondary grid - the architecture cooperation is noteworthy.

One can log in to multiple websites on the Internet with the same username; it stands to reason that the same should be true of virtual worlds. The difference, of course, is in the assets - something which was apparently not addressed in the teleportation... yet. Basically, IBM and Linden Lab had a handshake across their virtual worlds to verify that the systems could communicate. While the technical details require more digging to understand how this happened, the week old Linden Lab blog entry pretty much explains that this is only for logging in and teleportation. The real test will be the asset server.

And so, one's avatar will be hopping grids in the not too distant future. That sounds fun and interesting on the surface, but it also brings with it new problems that have to be looked into:

• Security: Soon, your password for your avatar will become that much more important as it leaves the Second Life sandbox and goes forth to brave new virtual worlds.
• Names: Naming limitations in one world may not exist in another. While this may not be a big deal for some, it can be a very big deal for others. Like Pighed.
• Alternate Avatars: We all know, or should, about alternate avatars in Second Life. Multiply that by the number of grids. While alternate avatars can be used for legitimate purposes, there are also illegitimate purposes...
• Copyright: Strengths and limitations of Linden Lab's de facto DRM may not be the same as other virtual worlds. Thus we may be looking at a sort of 'virtual' Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in the future, since adaptations in Copyright Law are notoriously slow when compared to virtual world development.
• Incompatibilities: Sure, you may be able to teleport your rockstar lookalike avatar to World of Warcraft, but you may end up at the wrong end of some creatures fangs (is there a right end?). Such issues are not without solutions, but the solutions may well be as numerous as there are virtual worlds.
• Farming: Will you be able to sell your special virtual items from WoW to Second Life users?

These are just some things I came up with off the top of my head. But here's the thing: While I can see that it might be fun and interesting to toss Nobody Fugazi across grids, I do have to wonder how that will be useful for me. If you tell me that the asset servers being communicated with will replicate the inventory of my avatar, I might find that interesting as a backup - but then, I'd rather have a local backup.

I'm not being a pessimist here. I do like the idea, but what I am lacking is a use case that would really make it all worthwhile. Maybe I've been out of the graphical virtual world too long to see any benefit.

Toss comments on how this would be useful, I'm all figurative ears.

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