acceleration in the metaverse
The always excellent UgoTrade, one of the best observatories on Second Life and virtual surroundings, has an article on Interoperability for Virtual Worlds in 2008? covering the most important current trends and their likely impact.
Interoperability, between different virtual worlds and between virtual worlds and the web, is certainly a powerful trend: ”2008 really could be the year of interoperability, or at the very least the beginning of interoperability starting with increasing levels of web services for the SL grid… [even if] 2008 maybe more of a preparatory year devoted to cleaning up code and protocols, this probably won’t be an obstacle to achieving at least some of the goals of interoperability. The fast development of OpenSim makes the open sourcing of Second Life server code something of a moot point”.
In fact, even if Linden Lab’s (almost-) open Architecture Working Group plans to develop the protocols that will open up the Second Life Grid from something operated solely by Linden Lab to where others can run parts of the grid, I am more and more persuaded that the open source OpenSim effort might get there first and de-facto force also Second Life to operate according to _their_ protocols. I think the rapidity of the response of Linden Lab to the open source developments is one of the most important things to watch in 2008. Of course, Second Life and OpenSim are not the only two kids on the block. In particular there are things to watch in the OpenCroquet world, especially the “virtual Intranets and Extranets” developed by Qwaq Forums on top of the open source Croquet platform. And I expect a revival of X3D (perhaps this? I am in their alpha program and will take a look).
The article also touches two more advanced and very interesting trends in virtual worlds, which are not usually discussed in business oriented articles on the metaverse.
One is the very interesting work that Ben Goertzel‘s Novamente team is doing to bring artificial intelligence agents to online virtual worlds. Using Second Life (or other virtual worlds) as VR training grounds for learning AIs is certainly an innovative approach that may result, someday, not only in more interesting VR worlds but also in smarter AIs. Will the first AI to pass the Turing Test be a SL bot?
Besides the virtualization of reality in the metaverse, there is an important trend toward the realization of virtuality, with technologies that permit giving physical reality to information and virtual objects. The articles mentions the WRLDs system where users can generate both virtual 3D and physical objects from their trading data to create a shareable social object from the symbolic language of trading. This is an example of desktop manufacturing (3D printing, or fabbing) technology, which will soon have an impact comparable to that of personal computing in the 80s by enabling a personal manufacturing revolution: exchanging physical objects on the Internet with virtual creation at the sending end and physical print-on-demand at the receiving end, in other words a first example of interoperability between physical and virtual reality. In my article Globalization and Open Source Nano Economy on KurzweilAI I try to imagine where this trend may lead: ”Instead of shipping physical objects, their detailed design specification in a “Molecular Description Language” (MDL) will be transmitted over a global data grid evolved from today’s Internet and then physically “printed” by “nano printers” at remote sites”.
Posted by G.P. on 01/08/08
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