0 Responses to The Blue Mars virtual world announced Flash multimedia integration tools (provided by Avatar Reality, the company behing Blue Mars) enabling developers to provide practically any…

  1. Prokofy Neva says:

    It is too early for standardization. There is no consumer demand for them. This is a geek affectation — and not even all geeks agree about this. When it is ready, it will come naturally.

    Discussions around Philips Design at Sophrosyne’s Salon had some chilling implications, i.e. clothing that reflects moods, and rating of people or trust assessment through some moods. This brings to mind the need first to establish universal human rights protections in this space, which ought to apply as they do anywhere else, before worrying about technical standards that in some case are busy removing human rights because only the companies’ interests are involved. The consumers’ needs are a healthy corrective to this.

    If LL is guilty as charged, then so is Dr. Yesha — so is anybody stumping for interoperability and open standards by their own lights. At least LL has a record on providing more freedoms than other games and worlds, and that can be built upon.

    • Prokofy: We have 30 years of virtual worlds, and you think it’s still too early for standardization? What will we have to wait for? To let the walled garden model prove its failure also in the virtual worlds field, and to fail and fail and fail again until users start demanding standards and openness? No, we *should* try to avoid the mistakes before users demand us to fix them.

      Regarding LL, Dr. Yesha, or the other four or five attempts in creating “VW standards”, I agree with you that something “global” should be created, but unfortunately there isn’t nothing (we don’t have a VWs W3C), so we’ll be better sticking with what we have. But I agree that instead of criticizing LL, Yesha should instead invite them to become a member of his Meraverse1 project.

      • Prokofy says:

        You’re *really* stretching it by saying “we’ve had 30 years of Virtual Worlds*. No, we haven’t, unless you’re going to imply text-based MUDS are “virtual worlds” — but then we can say “Shakespeare” and every pen and pencil game for the last millenium is “a virtual world”. I think it’s pretty clear that in the industry today, “virutal worlds” are defined as *online*, persistent, interactive worlds, in 2-3 or 3-D, not text.

  2. Metaverse says:

    Does the internet have any standards? The internet is still a place of anarchy, even today, more regulation and legislation became over the years as the internet developed itself into a frequently used medium as we know it today. Standards and protocols is something that will grow over time and will get implemented as this new technology moves forward. There is no point into trying to force these things. What is good is that more people create grids and do their thing as they see it. Over time certain grids will link towards each other, I’m convinced all this will sort out itself when the demand is there.

  3. Responding to Dr Yesha’s comments, I don’t see how promotion of OpenSim by Linden Lab will control it. None of the core developers of OpenSim come from Linden Lab, and the long term goal of OpenSim is to provide a general virtual environment platform that can be used with many different VW protocols, not just Second Life.

    Indeed, OpenSim is in a good position to be a general test bed for VW protocols. It aims to have both a modular structure (I wouldn’t say we’re completely there yet), and its BSD license make it very friendly for experiments. Dr Mic Bowman from Intel made this very point on the Interoperable Virtual Worlds panel from the September LA Virtual Worlds conference.

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