Re: [ogpx] Tourist use case

[Sean Hennessee <sean at uci.edu>]

Meadhbh Hamrick wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 1:51 AM, Morgaine
> <morgaine.dinova at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Infinity Linden (Meadhbh Hamrick)
> > <infinity at lindenlab.com> wrote:
> >
> > > also. just a show of hands. who's planning on implementing the tourist
> > > model?
> > Almost everybody who will operate virtual worlds, I assume --- that could be
> > hundreds of thousands of world operators, if not millions, mostly small.  We
> > certainly can't foretell!  And we can't get them to raise a show of hands
> > either. :-)
>
> you mean you think they're all going to be implementing their own
> software? i think that's unrealistic. even with the http servers,
> which i think we could agree is slightly less complicated than any
> virtual world protocol would be, web site operators use one of a
> handful of implementations: (Apache, IIS, WebSTAR?, ...)

I think this is completely realistic. With the progress that OpenSim is 
making towards standalone (SL Like) grids, there will very likely be 
services popping up all over the interweb providing standalone virtual 
worlds for free or at a very low cost, much like services today provide 
blog spaces, photo spaces, and a host of other web based services for 
free and for fee. I don't have to host my own Apache web server just to 
have a tumblr.com blog or a flickr.com photo site. The blog and photo 
site of the future will be SL like virtual worlds, (or perhaps more 
accurately, "virtual homes").

> > I doubt that it will be common to operate walled gardens once everyone else
> > is allowing their users to travel freely among the huge diversity of the
> > metaverse.  It certainly seems like a recipe for failure to deny tourism to
> > one's residents as a matter of policy, given that tourism is so popular in
> > the physical world today.
>
> well. the examples of large virtual worlds that exist today are, as
> you call them, walled gardens.

This is only because the idea of treating your "virtual home" as its' 
own space that can have "virtual tourists" come and visit is only now 
being implemented in OpenSim with standalones and hypergrids. In the 
past the focus was more on creating a system too much like SL in the 
sense that SL is one huge virtual world. I would assume that "SL Like" 
implies the 3d experience that is SL and not also the hugeness that is SL.

Peace,
Sean

> > However, this is a policy issue of course, and therefore not something that
> > VWRAP will dictate.  We merely provide the mechanisms to allow tourism when
> > desired, not mandate or deny it to any given world operator.
>
> i think it _is_ definitely important. we've set dates for the
> publication of standard documentations, and i think it's unrealistic
> to say that we are going to develop a standard that is infinitely
> flexible. we will need to focus on a small collection of deployment
> models. again, i have no problem including models that _will_ actually
> be used. i'm just not sure it behooves us to spend a fair amount of
> time ensuring our protocol flows work in deployment models that no one
> is currently planning on deploying.
>
> there's very clearly interest from linden for the "second life" [1]
> deployment model; intel has show a clear interest in the "cable beach"
> deployment model; OpenSim's UGAIM/Grid Mode and standalone deployment
> models. i'm just curious who is going to be coding software for the
> "tourist model."
>
> -cheers.
> -meadhbh/infinity

--

Sean Hennessee
Central Computing Support
Office of Information Technology
UC Irvine


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