Inflection Point?
Back in June, beta testers successfully teleported an avatar called Ruth from Second Life to an OpenSim server. Brian White, who also blogs at Virtual White, writes about how this transfer technology is evolving in MIT Technology Review. To my mind, this is a very significant development, that of virtual worlds interoperability.
Interoperability allows a person to maintain their avatar across worlds, a bit like OpenID does for websites. This is an important first step towards creating a truly navigable virtual terrain and is likely in the long run to be viewed as an inflection point in the rapid evolution of virtual worlds. Extrapolating from the current situation, within five to ten years use of virtual worlds will make the Metaverse look puny by comparison.
I’m currently researching the likely security implications of this expansion, which are considerable, but more on that at a later date. Roderick Jones is doing similar work and in a recent Metasecurity post asks when do virtual threats become real? I would argue that virtual threats are real and that our ideas of what constitutes violence require modification.
It might look clunky now but this is the future:
Ruth arrives on an OpenSim server.
Maintaning your avatar is a mere side-effect of interoperability, and almost entirely misses the point of the value of an interoperable metaverse. If you ask most users: “How much would you pay to be able to take your IMvu avatar into World of Warcraft,” the answer is generally “not much,” so avatar portability will not drive actual adoption of interoperability.
When people are using virtual worlds to do real work (which is starting to happen right now), and someone from IBM can meet with someone from Microsoft with the same ease as setting up a conference call, that’s what interoperability is all about!
I’ve written a little more about this at http://www.interopworld.org/ .
Hi Jon,
“Maintaning your avatar is a mere side-effect of interoperability, and almost entirely misses the point of the value of an interoperable metaverse.”
Good point, and I should perhaps have said ‘maintaining one’s presence’. I said nothing (a year ago) about maintaining one’s appearance though, which is actually what I think you’re referring to.
There’s be little point in turning up to a business meeting in a non-gaming world dressed as a Level 80 Death Knight. I doubt it would go down too well with the board. But there are characteristics of one’s avatar(s) that could be allowed persistence across worlds, particularly social worlds, rather than gaming ones. That – as you say – is what interop is all about.
I think you may be missing something when you say that ‘avatar portability will not drive actual adoption of interoperability’, because I think you’re taking the visual and game-specific functionality of an avatar as more important than the avatar-as-self aspect of the virtualised experience.
I’ll be checking out your site for more info and insights though, as you obviously have more of a handle on these developments than I do.
Cheers.