IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement

IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 12:01 AM by: Hamilton Linden
http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/07/08/ibm-linden-lab-interoperability-announcement/
This is a historic day for Second Life, and for virtual worlds in general. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another. It’s an important first step toward enabling avatars to pass freely between virtual worlds, something we’ve been working toward publicly since the formation of the Architecture Working Group in September 2007. These are still early days, however, so amid all the excitement, we thought it would be helpful to clarify exactly what we’ve done — and what still lies ahead.

Q: What did Linden Lab and IBM accomplish with this experiment?
Researchers from IBM and Linden Lab teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid to an OpenSim virtual world.

Q: Why is that significant?
It marks the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another, an event with implications for the entire virtual world industry. As the name suggests, the Open Grid Protocol used in the project enables interoperability between virtual worlds. With this experiment, we’ve taken a first step toward not just interconnecting Second Life with other virtual worlds, but other virtual worlds with one another. An open standard for interoperability based on the Open Grid Protocol would allow users to cross freely from one world to another, just as they can go from one Web site to another on the Internet today.

Q: Did you make a video of the event?
Yes we did:http://torley.s3.amazonaws.com/Across-the-Metaverse.mp4