The Caffeinated Penguin

Posted By matt on July 23, 2008

Okay, so I've done some more looking in to these virtual worlds, and am compiling my results here. If I have missed anything which others know about, please comment and let me know.

For the curious, my name on the Linden grid is “Fnord Bookmite”.

Servers:

So, the central open source version is OpenSimulator. It is designed to be run in a grid or standalone, and there are other grids listed on their Grid List. One of the more interesting grids is OSGrid, in that they run the central authentication and bookkeeping server, but other folks can “hook up” their own servers to the grid. So, it is a distributed edge grid with a central command and control hub.

This, of course, has me thinking about distributed P2P grids. Presuming a 2D orthogonal connecting “world grid”, you can have a central organizational “record keeping” structure which allows you to choose a vacant plot and plunk your server there. People connect to you via your neighbors, so really you would be peered with 4 other machines. The way you'd get “from here to there” is to walk there, passing from one server to another. Searches would work similarly – you initiate the search from where you are, and each place searches its neighbors, and the search ripples through the grid. When you have your answer, you teleport directly to that server. As individual servers drop off, it's not really a big deal, because 3 others can get there.

RealXtend has a server (based off OpenSim) and a client (based off the Linden Labs GPL-ed viewer) which has some nifty features. It is hosted on SourceForge, so the source is there. One of the nifty features they've added is the ability to teleport avatars between unconnected grids – a great and necessary feature. Folks will need to be able to move seamlessly (well, as seamlessly as teleporting is) between grids, bringing with you all your stuff as well.

On the “non SL” front, Sun is doing one called Project Wonderland which comes at it from a slightly different angle, but also does different things.

Google is also doing one, called lively, but I don't believe they are releasing servers so folks can run their own, which means I'm not really interested.

Viewers:

I'm not going to go into all the viewers here, as there are a pile of them, but AjaxLife is particularly interesting. It is a pluginless, browser-based viewer.

Cool Uses:

IBM is using this technology, coupled with sensors to do 3D Virtual Datacenters. The idea is that you can wander around your datacenter with the “heat” overlay turned on, and visualize the collected data as to what is hot and cold. Or, turn on the “load” overlay and see which machines are getting hammered (the one spitting flames has high load).

Category: LJ Import
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