Interview with AjaxLife creator Katharine Berry
By Adam Reuters
The Second Life blogosphere was aflutter on Monday with news (flagged first by Gwyneth Llewelyn and then Wagner James Au) that a talented young Teen Grid resident named Katharine Berry had created a prototype Second Life viewer that works within a Web browser.
It’s still early days for AjaxLife, Berry’s project, which allows users to teleport, chat, IM using buddy lists, and not much else. When I logged on, others could see my avatar, but AjaxLife didn’t let me see my surroundings or move around.
Nevertheless, as Au writes, this could change everything:
Up to now, accessing SL requires a separate client download and a powerful graphics card — two high hurdles for almost everyone on the Internet. A number of SL competitors have been targeting this very weakness, aiming to create a Web-based user-created world without such an awkward, time-consuming barrier to entry. Using protocols from libsecondlife, the open source SL project, Katharine has changed that assumption considerably.
Reuters got in touch with Berry via email to learn more about her project. The following is an edited excerpt.
Adam Reuters: Can you tell me a bit about yourself?
Katharine Berry: “Okay - I’m 15 and a half. I live in a tiny village about an hour away from London, England. I’m studying… English, French, German, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Computing, Geography, History and Maths. Dropping Geography at the end of the school year though - which is in a day and a half.
I’ve been on the Teen Grid for just under two years (Joined in July 2005), although I left for about six months in the middle.
AR: How did you develop AjaxLife?
KB: AjaxLife was essentially hacked together in a weekend, and worked on in spare time after school for about a week afterwards. It comprises something a little over 2,200 lines of code in various languages right now, and it was definitely, at least partly, a “learn it as you go along” type thing - I’ve never tried a web application (if that’s what this is) before, although I do have a couple of websites (http://tslemporium.com and http://tslprofiles.com).
AR: What are your plans to develop it further?
KB: I plan to make this thing scalableish. Once I’ve implemented some more features, such as search, starting IMs, profile viewing (all of which are certain to make it in) and fixed some bugs (the modal teleport dialog of doom), I intend to tidy up the source and release it under some friendly open source license.
So people can stop murdering my server.
