Gridnauts

The collaboration between Linden Lab, IBM and an eclectic collection of software adventurers on the Open Grid may be the most direct step taken so far toward a true ‘metaverse’. IBM’s Zha Ewry and Linden Lab’s Zero Linden talk about the progress they have made, and the implications of their work.

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Open Grid allows individuals and organizations to use and modify open source software to create their own virtual worlds, at a tiny fraction of what it would cost to design such a world byte by byte. Developers envision a whole universe of virtual worlds, large and small, public and private, corporate and citizen-controlled. While a metaverse exists to some degree today, its expansion is largely driven by the motivations of corporations and venture capitalists and the enthusiasm of a relatively few "early-adopters" to walk onto the landscapes imagined by a handful of internet visionaries.

Open Grid is an attempt to create an interoperable, open source and multi-owned system of servers for virtual worlds. The project benefited from the release of the Second Life client in January 2007 to those who wished to modify and build on the software. Developers were also able to leverage the work done by contributors to libsecondlife, (now libopenmv) a compilation of source code, research and documentation designed to integrate Second Life with the the larger metaverse and the web.

The Architecture Working Group coalesced in Second Life in September 2007 to develop communication protocols between clients and servers in an Open Grid system. The clients and servers running on the Open Grid may differ substantially from other clients and servers in the same system, but the integrity of the system as a whole depends on consistency of that portion of the code in each client and each server which enables many different clients moving across various servers to behave predictably. This is interoperability.

The initial thrust of the Architecture Working Group focused on the creation of a "universal avatar". For residents of Second Life, this means that the avatar which represents their identity in Second Life could leave the set of servers controlled by Linden Lab and enter servers owned and controlled by other entitities. Each avatar could move from world to world without sharing private and sensitive account information with every world the avatar visited. This goal was achieved early last month when avatar Zha Ewry teleported from a test grid (established by Linden Lab for the purpose) to a grid hosted by IBM on servers running OpenSim software.

The OpenSimulator Project is a BSD Licensed Virtual Worlds Server which can be used for creating and deploying 3D Virtual Environments... Out of the box, the OpenSimulator can be used to create a Second Life® like environment, able to run in a standalone mode or connected to other OpenSimulator instances through built in grid technology. It can also easily be extended to produce more specialized 3D interactive applications.        OpenSimulator

OpenSim is just one of many server software projects designed to allow the creation of independent virtual worlds on the Open Grid. It is much further along than many other efforts, however, and is preferred by many gridnauts. IBM's virtual worlds team has contributed significantly to OpenSim, as have many other developers.

Just last week, a beta test of the server-spanning software was initiated to allow other "gridnauts" to follow in Zha's footsteps. This part of the project alone required a great deal of original and creative programming, and many of the gridnauts, like early astronauts, have been instrumental in the creation and refinement of the software vehicles which they now ride to distant worlds.

There is a tension between an agile strategy of implementing only what you need today vs. the approach of designing for a range of future possibilities. Linden Lab has heavily leaned toward the agile approach.         Architecture Working Group

Much attention to the Open Grid has centered around the concerns of content creators who fear that the objects and scripts that they have created in one world may be pirated to another. Today, sharing objects and inventory from one Open Grid server to another remains just a possibility, not even a consensus goal, and certainly not a fait accompli. Even as concerns about intellectual property dominate the rhetoric about the Open Grid, some businesses are considering the potential for a broader market for their products coupled with additional tools for the creation process itself.

So, basically the challenge is that content providers want to specify rules for the content they create and at the same time with an open grid and with open source SL clients we cannot guarantee those rules. This is not necessarily fatal; an economy can work even when theft is possible. But it is a fundamental limitation to what we can do with technical solutions.         Protecting Content in an Open Grid

Background Reading and Videos

Open Grid Glossary

  • Open Grid Public Beta program is a Linden Lab sponsored opportunity for developers to make their virtual worlds interoperate with Second Life. Virtual world interoperability is enabled through the Open Grid Protocol, under development by the Architecture Working Group of Second Life residents.
  • Open Grid Protocol documents define the protocols by which a vast, Internet wide virtual world can operate. This protocol enables different regions of the virtual world to be operated independently, yet interoperate to form a cohesive experience.
  • Protocols are conventions or standards that control or enable the connection, communication, and data transfer between two computing endpoints. In its simplest form, a protocol can be defined as the rules governing the syntax, semantics, and synchronization of communication. Protocols may be implemented by hardware, software, or a combination of the two.
  • Platform describes some sort of hardware architecture or software framework (including application frameworks), that allows software to run. It is an agreement that the platform provider gave to the software developer that logic code will interpret consistently as long as the platform is running on top of other platforms. In the case of Open Grid, platform generally refers to those portions of the software framework which are required to be consistent among all participants in order to ensure interoperability.
  • Servers are computers dedicated to running server applications. A server application is a computer program that accepts network connections in order to service requests by sending back responses. In general, when servers are mentioned with regard to Open Grid, it is the specific server software applications run on many different kinds of hardware, that are being referenced.
  • Client is an application or system that accesses a remote service on another computer system, known as a server, by way of a network. For the purposes of Second Life, the client is synonomous with the "viewer": it is the part of the software which resides on users' (residents') computers, and connects with the virtual world server.
  • Viewer is the same as "client" for virtual world grids.




Guest Biographies





Mark Lentczner is an engineering director at Linden Lab. He is primarily focused on the architectural extension of Second Life and the software infrastructure to support its expansion to Internet scale. Within the company, he assists in building the engineering organization, and a leader in the effort to have a fully geographically distributed company through the use of collaborative technologies.

Mr. Lentczner has worked in Silicon Valley for over 20 years leading engineering teams on projects including virtual machines, software tools, cell phone browsers, and audio processing. He held leadership positions at Apple Computer, OpCode Systems and Go Corporation before running his own consulting firm for a decade with clients like OpenWave and Perforce Systems. He is a graduate of Harvard with a degree in Applied Math and Music, having studied with both the computer scientist Thomas E. Cheatham, Jr. and the composer Ivan Tcherepnin. More at: http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/cv.htmlMore details about Mark on his Curriculum Vitae.






David Levine, from IBM's TJ Watson Research Center, is a 23 year employee of IBM Research, with summer and university interneships, extending back another five years. His interests in Social computing and online collaboratoin extends back to work in 1982-1985 in IBM's onfline BBS style conferencing systems, and tools for sharing applications in the very early days of Personal Computing.

David has worked on a variety of projects in his IBM career, including network and systems management, Intelligent Agents, Reasoning engines, high distributed e-mail systems and reasoning systems for policy based systems.

David's current work is focused on Virtual Worlds technology, and the long term implications of broadly deployed social collaboration tools. He works with Linden Lab's Architecture Working Group, and IBM's team on OpenSim. David's work includes both the technical work needed to permit interoperation between virtual worlds, and how policy and social implications of this work.

David can be found in Second Life as Zha Ewry.

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