interoperability

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?

The pre-meeting to big industry conferences like the Virtual Worlds Fall 2007 convention in San Jose is often more important than the actual pre-set speeches and trade booths. And from various Twitters and Facebooks and hotel lobby chit-chat, the word on the street is that the pre-meeting involved a closed session of game and world makers like Linden Lab and Metaplace together with large companies like IBM, Cisco, and Samsung about interoperability -- starting the conversation about making standard protocols for 3-D virtuality on the Internet, and ultimately realizing the geek dream of walking between worlds, of having one identity or one log-on to reach the soon-to-be numerous virtual worlds, and being able to port content among the worlds.

The meeting evidently didn't get that far beyond outlying some basic common denominators. Some of the giant business companies hadn't even heard of some the game-gods that we avatars believe are our heroes, like Raph Koster, and the for their part, the game-gods marveled that a conversation about standardizing protocols that they have had been holding among themselves for more than a decade since MUDs was only now getting attention from the guys who want to make sure to sell them the widgets to connect their worlds -- as if men in tights was the only activity somebody would want to universalize.

This may be one of those occasions, to paraphrase Adam Smith, when the public has to worry when large competitors finally start to cooperate. Why? Because the diversity and integrity of individual worlds and games are at stake, and the RMT economies of some of them may depend on their makers being willing to keep tough protectionist legislation and strict customs inspection at borders. Real-life globalization has devastated the economies of the developing world and, Americanized content all over the planet. Will virtual globalization be as bland or even destructive? While developers and advertisers might like to see convergence and globalization, and an end to "walled gardens" and "silos" as the games and worlds are scornfully dubbed in order to sum up the problem of lack of passports and portability, no serious studies have been made of the consumers desire -- and willingness in practice -- to cross over among their worlds and games. Obviously an Eve starship jars the story line for the orc in World of Warcraft on the moor (of course, some will want to deliberately mix and mash these genres).

Aside from world-hopping, however, standardization not only of technical aspects but policy aspects of virtual worlds are an inevitability as more and more individual, corporate, and educational users are attracted to virtual worlds. For example, US government and publicly funded websites are mandated to be "Section 508 compliant" in conformity with a law to enable access for the disabled, so the government already legislates standards in some areas. If the industry doesn't make its own standards, government regulators may do it for them.

Eager to stay on top of the standardization race, Linden Lab issued a breathless press release today in San Jose saying that have launched a collaboration with IBM "to develop new technologies and methodologies based on open standards that will help advance the future of 3D virtual worlds." Evidently they didn't find any other takers at the pre-meeting for such announced collaboration, though surely other world-makers will be avidly following the LL claim that they have "built the Second Life Grid as part of the evolution of the Internet" as Ginsu Yoon, VP of Business Affairs claims. The standards contemplated include "universal" avatars to cross into multiple worlds, security-rich transactions of virtual goods, platform stability, integration with existing Web and business processes, and open standards for interoperability with the current Web -- all of it total blue-skying for the avatars of Second Life, who are lucky to hang on to their inventory from one log-in to the other, let along across the Metaverse.