acceleration in the metaverse
Metaverse platform gambling 1
I am beginning this series of articles on “Metaverse platform gambling” dedicated to my thoughts on a very fast moving target: the best metaverse platform to bet on. It is very clear that in the very near future one or another metaverse platform, or a combination of a few platforms, will take over the online world. A small consulting and development company does not have the resources to follow all existing and candidate platforms and can only bet on one or a very small set. At this moment I am inclined to place my bets on the three open source “official” next generation immersive education platforms selected by the Immersive Education Initiative: Second Life in its open source OpenSim version, Open Croquet and Sun’s Java-based Wonderland - Darkstar platform.
In the image composition above a 3D OpenSim hippo is visiting a Qwaq Forums virtual environments (Qwaq Forums is a hosted metaverse service for professional applications developed on Open Croquet). At the moment my preference fluctuates chaotically between these two platforms (I do not know enough yet about the Sun platform). Open Croquet integrates some of the best software engineering concepts and techniques, and “deserves” success. It is currently limited by its lack of accessibility—there is no such a thing as an easy access general purpose OC browser for OC metaverses (though in this excellent audio interview Julian Lombardi, the chairman of the board of directors of the Croquet Consortium, says that there may soon be one). The closed proprietary service Qwaq Forums is a showcase example of the advanced applications that can be built on OC, and provides an excellent virtual meeting environment with groupware tools, web browsing, spatial VoIP, webcam feeds and collaborative editing of documents in popular office formats.
OpenSim is still more alpha than beta but advancing fast (see this Reuters article on Central Grid and OpenSim), and I look forward to upgrading our experimental OpenSim server to the next release 0.5. Perhaps by the end of 2008 the OpenSim project may deliver a 1.0 release and start attracting large numbers of operators and users. The really big advantage of OpenSim is its compatibility with Second Life standard clients—despite all the bad press new users keep coming to SL, many of them stay, and for each bigtime brand that leaves SL there are a few companies that enter SL with a sounder strategy. I think OpenSim will be a clear winner once it integrates advanced groupware features similar to those in Qwaq Forums, full Flash support and some interactive videoconferencing and Internet TV features. I am now a proud member of the Qwaq-SL Liaison group and look forward to discussing this with other members.
Posted by G.P. on 02/03/08
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