Virtual World R&D Goals: Interoperability, Secure Virtual ID, Open Access

In the article titled: Open borders sought for virtual worlds by Scott Hillis 10/10/2007 in Boston.com

“Interoperability is emerging as a key goal of the nascent virtual world industry, which attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment on the hopes that video-game graphics and rich 3-D environments will supplant flat Web pages.”

The current virtual world closed proprietary systems limit growth. An analogy (on a much smaller scale) would be to compare today’s virtual world limitations to the early years of industrial CAD Textile systems. All files that were generated by these industrial CAD systems were proprietary. If the user designed something in an off the shelf application (that developed a variety of user friendly functions and tools far more rapidly because the mass market drove the development) they could not import it into the CAD system or even export it out. There was a huge user generated demand in the industry to allow universal file formats that could be imported and exported from the closed proprietary systems. That is when TIF, TGA’s and BMP files (universal raster file formats)  were introduced to these systems. Even the hardware systems for these industrial applications were proprietary at one time. The demands of the customer base drove and opened the development then just as it doing now with virtual worlds.

Virtual world users today are driving the demand for a secure virtual identity, open virtual worlds and interoperability.  As soon as an open, secure system is developed everyone will flock to it immediately, closed systems that choose to remain closed will fast become obsolete.

Currently there is simultaneous research into development of a secure virtual identity along with “Freeing the Avatars” to become transferable between different virtual venues. Hillis referred to it as a “virtual passport.” Once the avatars are transferable a secure virtual Identity application is critical to practicability for commercial use.  In a recent interview Louise Guay, Founder of My Virtual Model stated , “MVM’s mission is to create the standard for the virtual identity. This is also one of the many goals of the recent partnership developed between Linden Lab and IBM. Here is the official announcement.

According to a previous post titled: Part IV: MVM – Competitive Advantage in the Near Future (BrandME – Personal ID)

“BrandME will also include a user ID feature to protect the users virtual identity. MVM currently works with companies like Fidelity, Bank of America.  Big corporations are seriously looking at the virtual identity concept because as people are revealing so much personal information and storing it –they need to have the protection, safety and support of big companies.”

In case you were not aware IBM has a huge presence in Second Life. They (IBM) have a series of private and public islands in Second Life. According to their Innovation & Research Web page titled, “Virtual worlds come to life at IBM

“IBM has been experimenting on extending virtual worlds for business in three key areas: virtual commerce and work with clients to apply virtual worlds to business problems; driving new kinds of collaboration and education; and experimentations on pushing the limits with a broad community on what might be possible in virtual worlds.”

To be continued…