Re: [mmox] charter scope, thinking horizontally

[Charles Krinke <[e-mail]>]

Lets view this as the evolution of the
telegraph->telephone->television->holographicProjection->StarTrekTransporter
all speeded up over the course of a year or so.

That is:

Telegraph: Some modest messages via prims or objects passing messages from
one virtual world to another via a third party web site using http request
and http_response

Telephone: Some amount of textual of video chat between objects in different
virtual worlds.

holographicProjection: Some way to present a 3D representation of an avatar
in one virtual world in another virtual world.

StarTrekTransporter: Some way to transfer the presence of an avatar from one
virtual world to another.

In taking the problem apart, one can easily imagine these steps occuring as
a series of evolutions in MMOX. *Whatever* we wish to call them is fine and
doesnt matter very much. The point is that progressing through this
evolution gives this group a way to perceive of the steps and negotiate them
between various virtual worlds as evolution occurs. And, I would go so far
as to predict, that this evolution will tend to happen very quickly over the
next year or so.

Charles Krinke
OpenSim Core Developer
OSGrid Director


2009/3/29 Morgaine <[e-mail]>

> Larry, I agree entirely with your suggestion that an early focus on
> inter-world communications would be an easy win, and also with Charles'
> followup which added further incremental wins.
>
> This is why I am focussed so strongly on service decoupling.  When services
> are hardwired within a world, they typically become ever more non-standard
> and non-interoperable with every new world-specific feature that is added.
>
> In contrast, when services are decoupled then the need for compatibility
> with 3rd party services not only creates stability but also allows interop
> to bloom without prior planning.  And while not a technical point, the
> increased room for competition always helps growth in the area too.
>
> Although OGP is only a threadbare framework at the moment, one of its major
> selling points is service decoupling.  It has only decoupled two services at
> this time, the agent identity service and world region service, so there is
> a long way to go yet, but it's a start.
>
> You have highlighted *communications* as another area that is an extremely
> strong candidate for service decoupling, and in another thread we have been
> discussing the need for a decoupled *asset storage service<http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/mmox/current/msg01243.html>
> * as well, given that one's inventory will comprise objects from an
> arbitrary number of worlds and therefore should not be tied to an identity
> provider.  Charles alluded to avatar and object presence in his points 3 and
> 4, and decoupling object/asset storage services would make those a lot
> easier to achieve as well.
>
> I hope that we can express our thoughts about early wins in terms of such
> services, because the web provides a very strong precedent that we can
> leverage in this area, and the large number of supporting frameworks for
> services can facilitate progress immeasureably.
>
>
> Morgaine.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Larry Masinter <[e-mail]>wrote:
>
>> If you start horizontally, you might get significant value
>> without having to overcome some really difficult problems
>> of interaction between incompatible world models.
>>
>> Object interoperability is hard, because every world has
>> a different model for objects, geography, movement, physics
>> and so forth.
>>
>> Communication interoperability seems quite feasible:
>> chat using extensions to XMPP/Jabber, voice using SIP,
>> location using extensions to Geopriv, etc.
>>
>> I could see also agreeing on a form of GUIDs for object
>> references and a way of discovering metadata about
>> objects as well as content negotiation for object
>> representations.
>>
>> It's interesting to think about world<->world communication
>> as an extension of in-world <->  real-world communication,
>> e.g., to google-talk to avatars using Jabber.
>>
>> Many people seem to have flickr/facebook/etc. identities
>> for their avatars independently of the ones for their
>> "real" selves, so this isn't too far-fetched a concept.
>>
>> Getting some success on inter-world communication,
>> even if it is for a narrow application like "chat",
>> will help enormously in establishing the credibility
>> of any standards effort.
>>
>>
>> (historical reference:
>> http://larry.masinter.net/MOOGopher.pdf  )
>>
>> (IMHO caveat always applies)
>>
>> Larry
>> --
>> http://larry.masinter.net
>>
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>>
>
>
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-- 
Charles Krinke
OpenSim Core Developer
OSGrid Director