By Wagner James Au

What you're looking at in the screen captures here and below the fold represents a small but significant milestone in open source metaverse technology.  If in the future, Orcs in a fantasy MMORPG are able to IM their friends flying starships in a sci-fi MMO, this may be remembered as one of the innovations which helped point the way.  It's called the Parallel Selves Message Bridge, a new addition to the code forge of OpenSimulator, the "Apache for virtual worlds" project featured on OStatic last year.  The Bridge makes it possible for users within one OpenSim world to send IMs to users currently logged into another Second Life-compatible world.  (OpenSim is reverse engineered from SL's viewer source code.) 

 By Wagner James Au

It's been several months since I introduced OStatic readers to OpenSimulator,  sometimes described as the "the Apache of virtual worlds." The open source project originated as a reverse-engineered spinoff of Second Life's GPL-licensed viewer code, and continues growing and evolving far beyond it.  Especially with the recent addition of an important feature: the "Hypergrid", a new core OpenSim network architecture which may well establish the HTTP protocol of the metaverse.  It's the brainchild of Cristina Videira Lopes, a Xerox PARC alum now an ICS professor at UC Irvine who also happens to be an OpenSim developer and co-founder of a metaverse development company.

There is an interesting piece in iTnews today about a group of researchers using a wireless open source virtual world to teach language learning to students, including allowing them to practice. "Dubbed ‘Realtown’, the newly-developed wireless environment incorporates a virtual supermarket, schools, pharmacy and bank, as well as background sounds that may be enabled to increase the environment’s realism," says the story. Realtown is actually just one of many applications of the open source framework DIVE though, which stands for Distributed Interactive Virtual Environments. Here's what it's all about.