One small step for avatars, one giant leap for avatar-kind?
By Eric Reuters
For the past year, the promise of “grid interoperability” — the notion that an avatar could leave one virtual world and enter another — has been a hot topic among industry watchers. Skeptics doubted it was even feasible, but last week an avatar piloted by IBM’s David Levine made virtual history by jumping from Second Life and to the open source Second Life clone OpenSim.
Reuters caught up with Levine’s avatar Zha Ewry in Second Life to find out more. Teleport failures are a common gripe among avatars, and Linden is testing new methods to get avatars from place to place in its “Preview Grid.” With a little coding, Levine got Linden’s Preview Grid computers to send him to an entirely different world.
It’s not a “teleport” in the conventional sense — Levine insists on calling the jump “login via Agent Domain” — but he says real teleports are only a few weeks away.
“The login process looks like the exact login process Linden is prototyping, except it’s going to a region not on Linden’s Grid,” Levine said.
It will be a very long time before anything like true interoperability between the Second Life Grid and OpenSim worlds becomes available to general avatars. “We’re nowhere near production, this is in the very earliest phases,” Levine said. The caveats pile up: Linden’s “Agent Domain” is still in testing. Avatars can only move in the default “Ruth” form with no inventory or appearance customizations. Linden Lab and OpenSim use incompatible methods to reference server names, which emerged as an unexpectedly difficult obstacle.
These problems are all ones being all actively worked on. Veteran Second Life watchers have seen a number of proposals like identity verification and outsourced new resident orientation get released to great fanfare, only to be seemingly forgotten. But Levine and other OpenSim developers continue their work, and they’re receiving substantial cooperation from Linden’s programmers. While still in its technical infancy, the slow push towards interoperability continues to chug ahead.
