Interoperability; was: [sldev] Call for requirements: ISO MPEG-V ...

[Felix Duesenburg]

Lawson English wrote:
> Tateru Nino wrote:
>>
>>
>> Argent Stonecutter wrote:
>>> On 2008-06-02, at 19:22, Mike Monkowski wrote:
>>>> No fair.  You were thinking of something.  I don't intend to 
>>>> criticize; I just want to understand.  It takes many eyes to see the 
>>>> future. :-)
>>>
>>> OK. At the moment, my avatar in SL is a ferret. Four legged, about 
>>> two feet long, which is big for a ferret, I admit, but until LL 
>>> loosens up on the mesh and skeleton that's the best I can do.
>>>
>>> I have a collar with feathers stuck in it that I wear sometimes.
>>>
>>> If a friend of mine invites me to visit him in WoW, is it possible 
>>> for me to visit him as this avatar?
>> That would, of course, require the transfer of the avatar, the 
>> account, attachments, textures, LSL scripts(!), animations. 
>> Essentially a bit of a free-for-all, asset/content transfer, AND have 
>> the scripts reliably executed at the destination.
>>
>> Let me go out on a very tenuous limb here and suggest "fat chance".
>>
> Well, WoW and EQ are closed worlds. However, there's every possibility 
> that Wonderland, Croquet, and similar, more open, virtual worlds, will 
> be willing to let any and all such things in. The questions are:
> 
> how willing is LL to let specific assets loose?
> how compatible will the destination world be with the avatar stuff and 
> its appearance?
> how willing will said world be to let the avie keep its origianl name 
> and other such thigns?
> how willing will said world be to let an externally generated avie be a 
> "first class" citizen?
> 
> and so on.
> 
> The most compatible will be something like an IBM-LL agreement where IBM 
> hosts its own sub-grid.
> Slightly less compatible will be grids running a plain vanilla SL-like 
> world with full "trust."
> 
> And it gets less compatible from there,
> 
> Lwason
> 
> 

The main question to answer for any such thing to happen is, where's the 
business angle to justify such an effort? Creating interfaces and 
mappings between spaces that were never made with interoperability in 
mind is not a trivial task. Ultimately the customer, the user will have 
to pay for it to be enabled. Is there anything you want to do so badly 
that you'd part with your hard earned L$, PED, gold nuggets or real 
world currency? And, even before that, what's the business advantage for 
the respective companies running those worlds?

When reading about this discussion I spontaneously dismissed the idea, 
but upon second thought that is not so clear indeed. A while ago I 
played Entropia Universe, and took a brief glimpse at EVE Online. I too 
had fantasies of being somehow able to move my avatar between them. I 
have no clue what purpose it serves, but the idea is cool in a very 
fundamental way.

Apart from the technical challenge, you'd have to crack the business 
models first. If a company makes money by selling you stuff they make 
in-house, wouldn't they find it hard to see the advantage in opening the 
floodgate. Why would e.g. MindArk, CCP or Microsoft want that? Why would 
Linden Labs? Those being answered, we'd have a starting point. Hope I 
didn't miss a piece.

Felix