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…but a great step for virtual reality.
In my opinion, this is the best way to describe the result Linden Labs & IBM booked last week. Developers of Linden Labs and IBM managed to teleport succesfully an avatar from the Second Life grid to a grid of the open source community.
Only the avatar was teleported, the inventory, clothing or apparel weren’t. And it was only an experiment, “normal” users can’t use this feature yet. Why is this so important then?
Well, in my opinion, this is an important step towards standards for virtual reality. We aren’t quite there yet, but at least the companies behind these virtual environments have proved they want to make it possible to go from one to another.
I do think we may make a comparison to the internet itself. The universal use of the internet is only possible because all webpages, webservers and webbrowsers are compatible with each other. If this wasn’t the case, you would have several networks next to each other, and you would need a different viewer for every “net”.
This is also the current situation with virtual reality. There are several systems running next to each other, and for each system/community you need different software in order to be able to use it. In my opninion, this is the weak point for virtual reality. There are so many different virtual environments, that for someone that isn’t familiar with this subject, it is harder to get in. Also, when some of your friends are in Second Life, and other on Entropia Universe; are you gonna make yourself an account on both ?
With this evolution, the day that you will be able to teleport from one virtual environment to another comes closer, making it more accessible for people, making it universal, and creating a bigger potential and making it more attractive to businesses.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful that because of universal standards for virtual reality the community providers of today become companies like webhosting companies… only providing space for you to build your own space, instead of also controlling many of the things happening in virtual reality ?
We aren’t quite there yet, but I know I will be one of those telling their children “I remember the day the guy on the news told us about a new invention they called HTML…” Maybe we’ll all add “… and I also remember the day virtual reality was divided over several communities, and not just one big grid as it is now…”. Who knows… I’m sure this will be continued…
This is the video report Torley Linden made on the experiment:
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