by: Rick van der Wal
The issue of interoperability between virtual worlds has been a strange one for a long time. It seems like everyone wants it, everyone agrees we need ‘web-like’ standards of data exchange between worlds, but no one seems to interested in building it.
If anyone, IBM seems to have the best papers to build VRML’s successor, having a consistent presence int he back-end of a number of virtual world initiatives, but their recent move to private virtual worlds on the Second Life platform made them seemingly step away from the standardization of data. However, the same institution behind the MPEG initiative has recently announced a new project, the open standards for Virtual worlds:
The ‘Information exchange with Virtual Worlds’ [1] project intends to provide a standardized global framework and associated interfaces, intermediate formats definitions and the like, to enable the interoperability between virtual worlds (as for example Active Worlds, Second Life, IMVU, Google Earth, Virtual Earth and many others) and between virtual worlds and the real world (sensors, actuators, vision and rendering, robotics (e.g. for revalidation), (support for) independent living, social and welfare systems, banking, insurance, travel, real estate, rights management and many others).
The ‘V-MPEG’ standards are to become a set of rules and code, which allows 3D objects, the interfaces between virtual worlds, and lastly the interfaces between the real and virtual world to display the same data, in the same way. Just like you can load web pages in Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Safari, virtual world data should be viewable in a number of different clients (Active Worlds, Google Earth, or Second Life):
The first part (Part1) will describe an overall architecture that can be instantiated for all the foreseeable combinations of virtual worlds and real world deployment. This architecture will be derived from the requirements defined by a set of use cases (a number of these use cases are presented in the appendix of this document) that will be chosen to cover the entire foreseeable virtual world / real world combination application domains (see the illustration below for an example of the foreseen architecture and related interfaces for interoperability). The architecture positions all the related technologies, endorsed technologies and the MPEG technologies defined in this project. (This includes the interfaces between virtual worlds (Part2) and the interfaces between virtual worlds and the physical world (Part3)).
Of course the actual development of such standards would be an exciting step forward. Removing the limits imposed by specific worlds and clients and therefor the decentralization of content is one of the primary conditions for the 3D web to go anywhere. However, the initiave fails to mention its solutions to problems not necessarily restricted by pure code, such as the restrictions on virtual items to give them value (articifical scarcity). Read the entire report here (PDF alert!).
Via dusanwriter.com
Original post: http://digado.nl/new-virtual-world-standard-initiative.html
Leave a comment