Re: [mmox] Loosely Coupled Virtual Worlds

["Hurliman, John" <[e-mail]>]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of
>Morgaine
>Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 8:11 AM
>To: Jason Giglio
>Cc: MMOX-IETF
>Subject: Re: [mmox] Loosely Coupled Virtual Worlds
>
>On 2009/3/25, Jason Giglio <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>
>	http://www.meerkatviewer.org/whitepaper.pdf
>	http://www.meerkatviewer.org/whitepaper.odt
>
>
>
>
>The above document seems remarkably insightful on various fronts:
>
...
>
>*	Indirectly, it highlights that the Agent Domain model does not
>have a solution to the problem of accessing worlds with which there is
>no trust agreement.  People will want to enter arbitrary worlds, and
>therefore that restriction is inadequate.
>*	There will be millions of worlds in an Internet-scale metaverse,
>which makes the concept of interop through trust agreements far too
>narrow.  Trust loses its meaning entirely when scaled to millions,
>becoming mere paperwork or "security theater".
 
This is, in my opinion, the fundamental flaw in OGP. Explicit trust maps (whitelists) work great when IBM wants to define policy to connect to the Linden Lab grid, but has no meaning and no hope of scaling when you talk about defining trust for millions of simulation grids and millions (or at least thousands) of identity providers. This is the primary reason that Intel and many members of the OpenSimulator/OpenMetaverse community have not considered OGP as a strong proposal for virtual world interoperability. If this understanding is not accurate, it would be helpful if an OGP author could step in and clear up the confusion.

John