The Metaverse, a Reality?
It was a little over a year ago when I made my brief stint inside Second Life, and while I was impressed there simply wasn’t enough going on to really keep my interest. Sure there was alot of porn and gambling, but that was about all I could find. I had hoped to spend some time playing with their programming tools and trying to build some stuff of mine own, but the controls were far too cryptic and I never did figure it all out.
Well, a few months ago Linden Labs took the surprising step of open-sourcing the Second Life client. A nice gesture, but given that they still own the servers it really means you can’t make any changes beyond the cosmetic. Any new functionality or significant changes would break compatibility with the server, and then the client wouldn’t mean much anymore. But now Linden has surprising taken the next step, Open Sourcing the Server.
As speculated in the article, this opens the gate for "Second life" hosting services for companies or independent groups. Still not personally all that interesting, but neat I suppose. What i’m really curious about is Neal Stephenson’s vision of the "Metaverse". In "Snow Crash" he discusses the "Metaverse", a university/government virtual-reality network where people meet and interact daily (Just like Second Life). The original company now just hosts the master planet, tho, and all the buildings are hosted on independent servers and desktops. When someone logs into the Metaverse, essentially the door to their house is a gateway into the main network, and vice versa. This creates some interesting dynamics as people can only have so many visitors in their home as can be handled by their computer, and other interesting things where enterprising hackers have modified the code for their own servers to create fantasy worlds where physics and gravity no longer act normal. It’s a great read, and it sounds like Linden may be taking the first steps toward implementing his Vision in Second Life.
[tag:lindenlabs][tag:secondlife][tag:metaverse]
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