I am often asked why I decided to select OpenSimulator as the open source virtual world of choice and not Wonderland that was based on Java. IBM has a long history of working on open source projects and they are very strong supporters of Java. This is a language that is supported across all of IBM’s platforms and is a programming environment that we have deep skills in. The decision was not made without extensive research into all of the virtual world platforms. When Wonderland first appeared in June 2007 it was certainly short listed and in the process in IBM research we brought up multiple instances of the platform and we also experimented with MPK20. I was very impressed by the progress the wonderland team was making. They had developed avatars, spatial voice, basic physics, application sharing and collaboration tools.

When I first spoke with Daren Guard in February 2007 the project was only 1 month old and was written in C#. It was a Microsoft programming environment running on a .net framework. IBM officially joined the project when Sean Dague received IBM approval to contribute to the code in July 2007. This was just one month after the launch of Wonderland at the JavaOne conference in June 2007.

So why did IBM decide to contribute to OpenSimulator a brand new project with only a hand full of developers and not Wonderland or another major open source project?

The answer is simple and had nothing to do with the programming language. The reason IBM contributed to the OpenSimulator project was because of the community!

The OpenSimulator community was founded by individuals who were passionate about virtual worlds. The founders and members of the community truly believed then as they do today that they are developing what will be the foundation of the 3D internet. A rich immersive interconnected environment that is quickly gaining momentum across education, research. government, science and business.

I look forward to seeing the wonderland community joining the OpenSimulator project. If IBMers can learn C# so can the team from wonderland.

With the recent announcement of Second Life Enterprise  http://work.secondlife.com/en-US/products/ and the IBM announcement of Virtual Collaboration for Lotus http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/services/vc4sametime.html it is valuable to explain the differences between the private virtual worlds and publicly accessible worlds.

There are essentially 3 types of virtual worlds in common usage today that are forming the early framework of the Metaverse. The virtual world groups naming structure is very similar to the terminology provided for the World Wide Web. The terms Internet, Extranet and Intranet environments are very similiar in the Metaverse where the virtual worlds are referred to as Interverse, Extraverse and Intraverse environments.

1. Public Virtual World  (Interverse) – This is a virtual world hosted and owned by a 3^rd party organization such as second life

2. Privately owned with external access (Extraverse) – A virtual world hosted and owned by an organization that is accessible by multiple groups and not just a single organization.

3. Privately owned, Private Access (Intraverse) -  A virtual world located behind a firewall with access to the environment by only the employees of that company

Interverse Virtual Worlds

There are a large number of interverse environments that are accessible by internet connected users. Currently there are over 500 publicly hosted virtual worlds with approximately 600M registered avatars. The publicly hosted virtual worlds provide access either in a free or subscription based model and ranged from Children’s 2 ½D Flash based virtual world environments to full 3D rich immersive spaces.

Currently most public virtual worlds are standalone islands and do not offer any level of connectivity from one type of virtual world to another.  At present there are no industry standards for interoperability between virtual worlds that allow disconnected virtual worlds to exchange data, information, inventory or avatars.

Interverse Advantages

The primary benefit of using a Public Virtual world is having an existing user base.  This ensures all the existing users have a client and connection so they could potentially visit your site without any additional requirements.  Another advantage is shared costs within that virtual world. The cost of hosting, supporting, upgrading and maintenance are shared amongst all of the users.

Interverse Disadvantages

A public virtual world is similar to a public websites such as MySpace and FaceBook. These sites are useful to act as a local presence for a company but there are several issues associated with them.

Public virtual worlds require the users to register. As a result the owner of the public virtual world has the capability to monitor and track the users interactions, conversations and content they develop. There is no way to keep this type of information separate from the provider of the virtual world.  This information can be collected analyzed and could be used, sold or made available to others at the virtual world provider’s discretion.

When accessing external virtual worlds, like many applications virtual worlds require specific ports open on a firewall in order to use them.  When content streaming is required virtual worlds often use inbound User Datagram Protocol. or UDP. The UDP protocol provides a much faster method of transmitting information as the error correction is minimized. Error correction is often unnecessary when transmitting 3D objects, video or other visual information as data integrity is not required. In order to connect to a public virtual world the required inbound and outbound UDP and TCP ports will need to be opened on the firewall. There is often concern in opening in bound UDP as there is some potential security threats associated with this.

In a public virtual world the users do not truly own all of their products, inventory, art work, currency and intellectual property.  Most public virtual worlds have terms and conditions in relation to the ownership of these items. Quite often the terms state this content can not exist out side of the public virtual world environment.

The terms and conditions for a virtual world can also change at any time at the owners discretion. Obtaining access to the virtual world would requires the users to agree to the new terms and conditions. If you do not agree to these terms and conditions you will no longer have access to the environment.

Virtual worlds have an existing user base but this does guarantee anyone will actually visit a specific organizations location. Virtual worlds contain thousands of square kilometres of space. The existing audience is only enabled to visit a location but marketing of the environment still needs to occur and a compelling reason to visit still need to be provided.

Protection of intellectual property is also important as virtual worlds provide a platform for innovation. Creation of 3D scripted models to prototype real world inventions provides a low cost medium for validating an idea or concept. In several virtual worlds including Linden Labs the intellectual property rights are waived by the users. Inventions created in their public virtual world are considered public information and therefore can not be patented.

Another major disadvantage is there is no guarantee that the virtual world provider will remain solvent or the virtual world would stay open. We have already seen several virtual worlds established that have been sold or closed down. Some recent examples include vSIDE that was sold and Weblin that was shut down due to lack of funding. Even very large companies such as Google’s virtual world lively have closed down simply because they had no interest in continuing the project.

In the event the provider of the public virtual world should become insolvent than all of the content could be lost.  If the virtual world is purchased by another company or organization the content that was created belongs to the new organization.

Intraverse Environments

A privately owned virtual world behind a firewall is referred to as an intraverse environment that is only accessible by people who reside behind the firewall or have a private VPN connection to gain access to the virtual world.

There are several providers of intraverse virtual worlds today and here is a brief sample of just some of the engines currently on the market.

1. Second Life recently announced Second Life Enterprise based on their popular second Life  http://work.secondlife.com/en-US/products/
2. IBM has developed Lotus Virtual Collaboration Suite that is integrated with Lotus Sametime that is based on Opensimulator. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/services/vc4sametime.html
3. Qwaq or Teleplace  have developed a virtual world based on Croquet that has unique application sharing capabilities. http://www.qwaq.com
4. Forterra developed the Olive platform that was originally designed for defense. This virtual world now supports solutions for education, health care, retail and many other environments. http://www.forterrainc.com/
5. Protosphere was developed by protonmedia and provides a 3D immersive environment and a webex type application sharing capability. http://protonmedia.com/
6. Active worlds who is one of oldest virtual world environments engine has been used in hundreds of behind the firewall solutions. http://www.activeworlds.com/
7. Sun’s MPK20 application based on java is in early development and show promise as a platform independent virtual world engine. http://research.sun.com/projects/mc/mpk20.html
8. ECS Nexus engine used primarily by defence for the purpose of training simulation http://www.ecsorl.com/solutions/Products.html
9. Reaction grid developed Banbury that is a appliance customised packaged version of Opensimulator running on a windows platform. http://www.reactiongrid.com/Default/Firewall.aspx
10. 3DI has developed an enterprise version of Opensimulator and a web based client http://3di-opensim.com/en/
11. many many more ….

An intraverse resides behind a firewall. An organization may have a privately owned virtual world on the internet and for naming conventions we will call that an extraverse. This environment we have referred to as an extraverse is when members outside of the organization require access. An intraverse would not be accessible by anyone outside of their private network environment. Companies are beginning to experiment with privately owned virtual world environments either on the internet (extraverse) or in a private intranet environments (intraverse)

Innovative companies already have privately owned publicly accessible virtual worlds. Examples include MTV who have a range of virtual worlds for their community, Lenova who have a virtual world for selling computers and Wells Fargo who has a virtual world to showcase their products and services. Unfortunately none of these virtual worlds are connected.

Like the early days of the internet when web sites were disconnected it was logical to reside in a Public environment in order to leverage the existing customer base. Early examples included AOL and Compuserve. As the standards for the internet evolved it become more logical to have a privately owned virtual world for attracting and connecting with your user base.

Intraverse Advantages

Owning a private virtual world is very similar to owning your own internal and external websites. A company can certainly move their primary website to any of the many publicly hosted websites such as Facebook or myspace but this would obviously be a step backwards.  Just like managing and owning your own websites the main advantages of having an owning your own private virtual world is control over the environment.

It is imperative that a company have full control of any internet hosted environment that they may use to represent them to the world. This is very important as it allows the owning company to own the data and control the message they convey to the world. This will ensure the company is represented in a manner that is in line with the companies policies, values and standards.

Privacy in virtual worlds is a major concern. The ability to manage, own and control the privacy of the users is extremely important especially when you are having confidential meetings and sharing data or information of a confidential or secure nature.  All data and content for a privately owned virtual world can reside on the companies servers.

With a privately owned intravrese the terms and conditions for the virtual world are established by the company and not a third party service provider. This ensures the organization does not have to compromise their values in order to comply with the terms and conditions of a third party virtual world.

The ability to have local copies of the data and information within the virtual world is also important. In the event that a situation occurs that requires the data to be restored there is no guarantee that a public virtual world provider can restore that information.

An intraverse can also manage the access control for everyone who visits this world. This will ensure that individuals or organizations that the organization does not want in the virtual world are not able to obtain access to the virtual world.

When a virtual world resides behind a firewall there should be no need to make any modifications to the firewall configuration for users to obtain access unless the users who require access reside outside of the firewall (extraverse).

Ideas and inventions created in a privately owned virtual world can be prototyped confidentially. Should the prototype prove successful then patents can be filed for these inventions. This is not currently possible for inventions prototyped in several public virtual worlds.

Another advantage of a privately owned virtual world includes the ability to own your content. The development cost for content can be high. With the ability to own your content you can repurpose existing content reducing the cost of future environments and events.

There are many more advantages to owning your own virtual world and we would be happy to provide additional information on request.

Intraverse Disadvantages

An intraverse will often require you to download a separate client than the client that is used to access a public virtual world. This would result in two clients for each user. A user may require one client for accessing the public virtual worlds and one client for accessing the privately owned virtual world.

You will need to host, maintain support and upgrade the privately owned virtual world.  This is a very large task and quite a complex process due to the rapid development of the technology supporting these environments.  It is always recommended to identify and engage an external organization for the purpose of providing support.

Virtual World Strategy

Virtual worlds continue to grow at a rapid pace!  As this growth accelerates enabled by the early adoption of  education, governments and business we need to begin the process of strategic planning on how the 3D internet should evolve. Virtual world interoperability is beginning to occur and now it is possible for a single avatar to traverse from one companies virtual world to another and bring their inventory, identity and appearance with them.

Today when you connect to a 2D internet site the naming structure is common (WebsiteName.COM .NET .ORG …), the main websites ports are common, port 80 for http and 443 for https etc.  This standardisation allows a person to navigate from one website to another with very little effort or thought on their part.   Usually CompanyName.COM will take you seamlessly from one companies website to another and this is similar for OrganizationName.ORG,  EducationalInstitute.EDU and many other 2D websites.

The Problem

When you travel from one 3D internet site to another today there are no standards. One site maybe grid.CompanyName.COM:9000:island/Xcord/Ycord/Zcord another maybe just CompanyName.COM:8002 or any variation they choose during installation.  Several virtual world evangelists envision a future where  3D internet presence will be as common if not more pervasive than having a 2D website today.

This raises an interesting problem. How will we enable a consumer to connect to a virtual world if we do not have a common naming structure in place. If I want to visit CompanyX’s virtual world and I have a 3D client open what do I type in the URL ? Today it is something convoluted and confusing. For example if you wanted to visit Terra Nova 5 on the v-Business grid you just have to know to type secondlife://sim2.v-business.com:9000:Terra%20Nova%205/127/127/24 or find a link somewhere else to take you there.  This is obviously not possible for the average consumer to remember so they need to default back to lists and search engines in order to find the location they are looking for.

The Solution

In order to resolve this serveral things need to occur. We need to decide on default parameters that everyone will adhere to. This has to include default entry island or location for an island pointer, landing zone or landing pointer, default ports and default bottom level domain (preferably none).  From a users perspective teleporting to a virtual world should be as simple as surfing to CompanyName.COM today. No more no less.  A lot of the issues of default landing zones, default islands etc can be handled with a configeration file always in the same location but we will at minimum need to know where that file will always be located.

In addition to this we are seeing 2D browser and 3D viewers starting to merge with browsers in 3D viewers and viewers in 3D browsers. This leads me to the conclusion that it is imperative we have a Top Level Domain Name for Virtual worlds so users can decide 1) do I want to launch a traditional 2D website (WebsiteName.COM, WebsiteName.NET, WebsiteName.ORG) or 2) do I want to launch a 3D Virtual World website (VirtaulSiteName.????).

What Top Level Domain Name

Now the question arises what Top level Domain Name do we need. Countries typically have two letter top letter domains so .VW (Virtual world) may not be approved but I don’t believe we should rule it out.  .GRID maybe applicable sometimes but a company or user may have a personal sim and grid doesn’t convey the concept of a virtual world. Other options could also be .WORLD it’s short and a single word  .3D maybe appropriate but there is no precedence in using numbers in TLD’s. Other options .METAVERSE or .VIRTUALWORLD but I would hate to be typing these in on a touch screen.  Perhaps .VERSE maybe appropriate for metaVERSE, paraVERSE, intraVERSE, extraVERSE etc.  We could start with VERSE and grow to EDUVERSE ORGVERSE as sites evolved.

What Are Your Thoughts

Do we need a top level domain for virtual worlds? What would you recommend ? What would be the growth strategy when all the Virtual World TLD’s are used up?

I would like to raise the concept of a 3D domain name.

with  begin to establish there position in the emerging 3D internet