Virtual Worlds Galore
Written on July 2, 2008 by Katherine W. Prawl
I was just talking to Henrik Bennetsen at Stanford Humanities Lab about his project, Preserving Virtual Worlds. So much has been happening in the homebrew virtual worlds space that it’s hard to cover it all, but we exchanged some info about various sites we’ve each visited, and talked about the possible future of these exciting developments. Henrik said he’s going to post some “bullet points” on the project wiki based on our conversation, so I won’t try to duplicate what we discussed here. We decided to save for a later discussion how all this ties in to the archiving project, but we did briefly touch on that, too. In particular, Henrik was interested in my opinion of how Second Inventory software can be used to back up content from Second Life and related open source grids.
As it happens, I left a MICA meeting to talk to Henrik, and we had just been discussing many of the same things there, although on a more concrete basis. While Henrik was interested in general concepts, the MICA group is actively working on establishing one or more servers using different VW platforms, to use for developing their astrophysics simulations in 3D. One simulation that has already been done using OpenSim software is documented in this YouTube video:
The developers of this Newtonian n-body simulation, a group in Japan called Genkii, are now working with MICA. Adam Johnson and Jeff Ames are members of the Tokyo Genkii group, and are also OpenSim developers.
Tonight yet another group I’m involved with, the ISM planning group in Second Life, will be discussing yet more aspects of the same things, how to expand our virtual museum into the growing (someday to be) interconnected metaverse.
So, all the research I’ve been documenting in this blog is starting to have some results in the real world … uh, I mean, virtual world. (It’s more and more difficult to tell the difference between them these days.)
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