IBM, Second Life team up for a borderless virtual world
IBM and Linden Labs, the operator of the Second Life virtual world, said they will work on ways to eventually let people use the a single online persona in different online services.
By Agencies |
SAN FRANCISCO:
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.
Currently, people who create a character, or avatar, in one virtual world cannot take that identity into another service. Designing a detailed avatar can take well over an hour, so a closed system discourages customers from abandoning that investment. But it is also a barrier to growth since few people bother to start the process anew in multiple virtual worlds. An open system would let people create one avatar that would keep the same basic appearance and customer data no matter where it was in cyberspace.
“It is going to happen anyway,” said Colin Parris, IBM VP of digital convergence. “If you think you are walled and secure, somebody will create something that’s open and then people will drain themselves away as fast as possible.” Linden Labs is betting that an open system will reward interesting worlds with more customers and punishes dull ones with an exodus of users.
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.
Currently, people who create a character, or avatar, in one virtual world cannot take that identity into another service. Designing a detailed avatar can take well over an hour, so a closed system discourages customers from abandoning that investment. But it is also a barrier to growth since few people bother to start the process anew in multiple virtual worlds. An open system would let people create one avatar that would keep the same basic appearance and customer data no matter where it was in cyberspace.
“It is going to happen anyway,” said Colin Parris, IBM VP of digital convergence. “If you think you are walled and secure, somebody will create something that’s open and then people will drain themselves away as fast as possible.” Linden Labs is betting that an open system will reward interesting worlds with more customers and punishes dull ones with an exodus of users.
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