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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.
You've probably read a bit about OpenSim, the BSD-licensed virtual world server, and recent news that IBM and Linden Lab are working to make Second Life and OpenSim interoperable. Besides that project, what's OpenSim about, who's working on it, what are they doing with it, and how do you get involved as a developer and participant? Here's a starter's guide, created with the help of Tish Shute, whose virtual world blog UgoTrade is an indispensable resource on the latest in OpenSim news.
