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Open Source Metaverses
Posted on: February 16, 2008 at 12:00 AM

OpenSource Metaverse Project The OpenSource Metaverse Project provides an open source metaverse engine along the lines of the commercial metaverse engines Second Life, There and Active Worlds.

Open Source Metaverses

OpenSource Metaverse Project
The OpenSource Metaverse Project provides an open source metaverse engine along the lines of the commercial metaverse engines Second Life, There and Active Worlds. The OpenSource Metaverse Project was created because a strong demand exists, and large developer following, for virtual worlds that allow customization by the player and creation of one's own worlds. Closed source virtual worlds exist already - Second Life, There and Active Worlds - but we needed a metaverse engine that is flexible, scalable and that we can customize to an extent not possible within individual proprietary worlds. The key deliverables of the OpenSource Metaverse Project are a server engine and a client component. The server engine can be installed, configured and administered by anyone to create their own metaverse, somewhat analogous to an Apache web server for web content. Instead of web pages, a metaverse server will serve up the data and contents of a 3-D virtual world that can be customized by the administrator.
Open Source Metaverse _Source_Metaverse" target="_blank">
Because he knows something about being at the whim of faceless decision-makers at profit-minded gaming companies, Ludlow is a big fan of an emerging concept in massively multiplayer online game circles: the open-source metaverse. Built by independent contributors, the open-source metaverse is an infinitely extensible virtual world with few rules and no oversight from corporate overlords. "Instead of the game being developed by a game corporation, it would be developed by multiple users donating time in sort of a wiki style," said Ludlow, a philosophy professor at the University of Michigan. "This is a different picture, one in which the games would emerge in a bottom-up kind of way. The structure wouldn't be dictated, but would emerge from numerous people trying to extend the game space." Ludlow acknowledges that his vision of a fully open-source virtual world is a couple of years off. But it's not total fantasy.
The Near Future of the Metaverse
An interesting recent article of the Times Online ( Welcome to a revolution with no end in sight) says: Virtual reality used to be a popular notion a decade or so ago, but now the phrase sounds so dated that the concept has become unfashionable long before it exists. Yet a version of the concept is taking off as people want to lose themselves in the complex virtual worlds of multiplayer computer games - and it heralds a revolution in media consumption that is unfolding at blistering speed. Even if we don?t say Virtual reality anymore but Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), the concept is still Stephenson?s Metaverse: a high definition 3D digital virtual world where users can meet and interact just like they do in the physical world. This concept has been around and ?sleeping? for quite some time, and led to the emergences of the Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) in the nineties.
The Metaverse ESB
You make many good points and clarify a number of the (somewhat rhetorical) questions I raised. You point out that ESB's should provide all the capabilities offered by EAI technologies, and many they lack. You point out that ESB's should provide the core communications backbone for entire enterprises, regardless of their topologies, heritage, platform, protocol and information representations, etc. You clearly articulate that ESB's have adapters and translators enabling messages from different systems to be translated and transformed in order to ease integration of heterogeneous systems. However, I get this. I see exactly where various players are going when they advocate the many "benefits" of ESB. The point I was trying to raise is that I am fundamentally at odds with the notion of buying and/or building a communications "bus" for an enterprise.
Open source Metaverse Roadmap
I?ve been fascinated for many years by the emergence of virtual worlds. Their attractiveness is obvious to anyone who has read a work of fiction and imagined themselves in that world, either alongside the heroes or off exploring new spaces. Paper and dice role-playing games (such as D&D or Transhuman Space) offered an approximation of virtual existence, but did so through descriptive language (and, often, little lead wizards, goblins and the like). As personal computers grew to have powerful visual capacities and global network connections, however, the opportunity arose to create immersive alternative worlds that could be experienced by anyone, regardless of imagination.

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