News of Linden Lab and IBM collaborating on virtual world interoperability was released last week, and the consensus isn't all positive. Questions are being raised not only about the technical hurdles and actual market demand, but whether or not Linden Lab should be the ones to handle standards definition in the first place.
It all began in a closed-door meeting at Virtual Worlds 2007. While there were a large number of companies in attendance, the official press release lists just two, Linden Lab and IBM, as working on any kind of official project. Indeed you would have to wonder why the day after a large meeting of minds among virtual worlds stake holders, two of the players attempt to deliver a fait acompli to the public. They plan on creating standards for "Universal" Avatars, Security-rich Transactions, and generally support the notion that an Internet user should be able to flip between worlds like they do between websites.
Many feel this may not be possible. John Lopez commented on Metaversed recently about his experiences trying to make it possible for an avatar to move from one MUD to another. In his case, incompatible components had to be stripped from the account until very little was left. "By the time you distilled things down to the lowest common denominator," he said, "you were happy that your name and description survived the trip." This was an example from a text-only world ("MUD" stands for "Multi-User Dungeon") - how much more difficult might this be when trying to convert 3D graphics and scripted objects?
Raph Koster, CEO of Areae, was in attendance at the original meeting and had concerns of his own. No real market research has been done, which might mean that even if these interoperability standards were functional, they might not be something consumers want in the first place. Most of what was being proposed was based on assumptions that weren't necessarily sound or agreed upon, not the least of which was the nature of identity: "Much time was spent on discussing things like a federated identity system that can cut across world operators, something which may actually be illegal in Europe. Several folks seemed to come in with the assumption that avatar = identity = user."
Commenters on Raph's blog echoed these sentiments, and many were concerned that defining standards based on today's technology would be a mistake. "Can you imagine the web experience of today if someone had decided to require universal compatibility based on the screen sizes and color palettes typically available on, say, mid-range 1995 laptops?" said Kevin Bjorke. In response Richard Bartle made a disturbing comparison: "I don’t have to imagine it, I saw what happened when WAP came out based on a lowest-common- denominator phone spec."
For many Second Life businesses, however, the idea of Linden Lab defining a standard may be the deal breaker. "[...] when LL starts using industry-standard 3D formats, I'll start to take these initiatives at face value. Prims and dodgy sculpties are actually de-evolution for serious content creators who have been around a while." commented drOffset at Metaversed. While they don't seem interested in supporting other's standards, their own seem ill-defined at best and are rarely publicly documented. If it turns out that interoperability standards are possible, if consumers do indeed want them, and if they're defined to be flexible enough for future technologies, we still have to ask: is Linden Lab really the company to define them?
>after a large meeting of minds among virtual worlds stake holders, two of the players attempt to deliver a fait acompli to the public.
I think it's safe to say this press release didn't just "happen" and not just "after a large meeting," as the text/concept would have had to have been cleared in IBM hierarchy weeks in advance. Even LL wouldn't be clearing this in a day. So it came well before the meeting.
From talking to some of the major players at the VW fair, I can say that some were very angry at this undercutting press release that seemed ludicrous -- SL setting any standards on grid stability?! IBM as an authority on avatar classes?! Etc.
I think it was good that at VW07, Christine Renaud of Cisco sort of smoothed over this drama simply announcing that there was something called VWIF getting started, Virtual Worlds Interoperability Forum, and interested parties could participate.
Hey Prokofy, as I edited that one line you picked up on, i guess I should respond :)
I didn't mean that they rushed off and got a PR together. I was just surprised that one IBM hand could be at this meeting, while another could be getting ready to deliver this PR, and that LL, sitting pretty, would meekly go along with this.
Apologies for not being clear.
As someone who attended the (rather open) closed door IBM meeting, it seems to me that most attendees were taken by surprise by the exclusive LL and IBM announcement. I can only assume that IBM's left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing, because to announce a bilateral agreement the day after multi-party talks is just bad politics.
Folks at the IBM meeting were openly dubious about Linden Lab's technical ability to design an interoperability standard. LL has demonstrated their inability to maintain a stable service and they have a track record of reinventing the wheel for things like scripting languages, transport protocols, geometry representation, and avatar meshes.
Regardless of the noise LL is making, most companies working in this field don't trust the designs of technologists who sold their community a load of doomed tech like prim based geometry and LSL.
It wasn't "rather open," Trevor. You had to be invited. You had to be one of the cool kids. The cool kids always imagine, if they are invited, that it's "open". It wasn't. So let's be clear on that.
And yes indeed, most were taken surprise, and yes, Nick, they did sit pretty and say nothing (and while it's conceivable one hand of IBM doesn't know what the other hand is doing, I doubt it).
Prim-based geometry and LSL may seem like "doomed tech" to someone offering a competing technology, Trevor, and obviously it may be in your interests to pronounce its death prematurely. But there are some advantages to having prim building blocks which are surely easier for ordinary people to use than sculpties or textures in Photoshop. And LSL also can be something that some rudiments can be used, without being a programmer, like people cut and paste HTML. So it has some advantages to making the platform open to people who aren't necessarily top coders.
How open is a platform, really, when it requires highly intensive specialized knowledge to use it to make something?!
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/28/1941209
reality check 2004
Dodgy sculpties?
Actually I rather easy can converted sculpties to .obj or .dxf That Blender or Google-Sketchup etc. etc. can load. The format / structure of sculpties are pretty simple and open.
I guess I haven't said it enough, but (once again) Ogoglio is not Second Life II and Linden Lab isn't Transmutable's competitor.
Cel wrote> "The format / structure of sculpties are pretty simple and open."
I think what's questionable to other developers is that instead of using one of the existing standards for meshes or heightmaps, they rolled their own. It is nice of them to make their custom formats open and simple, if not standard based.
I love the graphic used with this story because it summarizes the challenge of interoperability in an instantly understandable fashion.
Personally, I find the whole interoperability thing implausible beyond *federated* features (say, the ability to IM between worlds and maybe single signon for identify management across worlds). The avatars themselves and all their toys... it is just too much to ask for virtual worlds to have any level of fidelity on these things. I have to fight with my 3D packages to import supposedly industry standard formats between products specifically engineered to work with industry standard formats. (Can anyone say UV map corruption? Grrr...)
And the interesting thing? 3D graphics are some of the *easy* stuff. Scripted items? Please, we can't make it from one version of the same programming language to the next without unexpected gotcha's... LSL code isn't going anywhere but Second Life anytime soon.
What is even more amusing about this whole prospect is the comment "and generally support the notion that an Internet user should be able to flip between worlds like they do between websites." I don't know what Internet you guys are using, but I have a password manager filled with a hundred passwords for sites that I visit. Yes, my browser can load just about any web page, but we don't have *truly* seamless browsing even on the 2D web. (If you don't believe me, clear your password cache and see how many username/password pairs you have to use to get through your daily use of the web.) That much hassle because we can't decide on a way to handle Identity + Authentication successfully, something that *could* be handled by a simple authentication token.
(Oh, that identify management comment is a can of worms though. Trusted providers? Loss of anonymity? Excessive transfer on non-essential details? Spam gold mine? Yeah, there is are *many* reasons why we haven't decided on a way to handle identity management yet.)
I am wondering since more than a week why nearly everybody tries to imply that the meeting mentioned was some inaugurational congress for a hidden conspiracy with a sinister agenda. It was a meeting by invitation only, period. This is perfectly normal and usual in the industry. It is debateable if you HAVE to do it this way. But - considering the meager results surfacing so far - I wonder what would have been achieved, if they just announced the topic on a website and invited everybody interested to join.
When you plan something like this you usually want to get some clout behind it, first, before you open it up. So you invite the big companies and the respected experts. Thats how it was done.
What I am wondering, too, when checking out the repercussions of the meeting and the Linden/IBM announcement in the traditional press and in the blogosphare is,
Why the hell is everybody focusing in the idea of the "Universal Avatar"?
If you look at the press release and the information surfacing from the interoperability meeting there were many topics, but this one seems to be the only one which people discuss. Unfortunately it might be the one which is hardest to achieve - and might come in a very different form than most, who write about it in an excited way, expect. A "single sign on" solution might be possible - if hard to implement (see Johns comment on the siutuation on the web). A (preferably OpenID-based) solution to find people, that I already know on a new platform (if they want to be found) is nice and no rocket science, either.
A straight transfer of avaters or (usable) content is impossible without a lot of translating/mapping. This is NOT a matter of technical standards. Virtual worlds are just too different - and will stay different in a similar way like web sites are different today, although they all use the same basic set of technologies.
Please lets all read the Linden/IBM annoucement again. The issues mentioned were
* Universal Avatars
* Security-rich Transactions
* Platform stability
* Integration with existing Web and business processes
* Open standards for interoperability with the current Web
Forget the first for a while and look at the other four. They might be much more important in the short to medium term and deliver much more usable results. I admit that they don't sound as sexy as "Universal Avatar", though. :)
Pham,
If you were invited to this meeting -- were you? -- then it would not seem like a conspiracy. If you were not, it would.
It should have had users -- interoperability begins its vaunted claim for a need for its very existence by contending -- with little backing IMHO -- that avatars "need" to walk between worlds.
Has anyone really asked any real avatars?
Worse, if you were told about the press release or were IBM, the press release wouldn't seem like a conspiracy. If you weren't IBM or weren't told about it, you might very well be hugely angry -- as some key players I talked to at VW really were angry. This is the reality.
You don't have an industry in which an open Virtual Worlds convention, in principle to which anyone with $1,000 in the industry can come to, and then hold a pre-meeting with only some select players. Worse, you don't plan with only one of the players for weeks to issue a press release the morning after the pre-meeting, presenting a fait accomli with 2 of the attendees of the closed meeting -- rather than announcing a consortium like Virtual Worlds Interoperability Forum. That is in fact what LL did.
The closed meeting of titans may well have been justified -- that's how you can keep fearful titans convinced that they still matter when they may represent businesses either desperate for their lost advertising dollars and customers who have disappeared into the Internet or simply clueless about VWs. And it may have been justified if the titans not yet really in virtual worlds are still hugely important as they make/maintain/run/whatever the Internet and business machines in general. But...what's at issue isn't really the closed meeting.
This "being how it's done" in your view wouldn't explain why only 2 of the players -- Linden Lab and IBM -- got to be on the press release, announcing the very subject and project that the closed meeting, which did NOT agree to do a joint press release, was about. It's just a pre-emptive move, and was seen exactly as that.
The more mature titans will simply walk around this -- that was clear from Cisco's remarks about the need for a broader VWIF. Others quietly chuckle at the idea of the Lindens saying they will set standards on grid stability.
It wasn't the first meeting; it won't be the last. But what matters isn't even so much who rules, but HOW they rule, the process by which they obtain consent of the governed -- US.