building the metaverse?

I've heard that Linden Lab wants SL to become the 3d Web, an open set of protocols that everyone can use. I've heard that SL want to be the metaverse. I've heard these notions but I haven't seen any moves toward that kind of functionality. Well, here is a company that seems to be serious about it:

http://interreality.org/about

Yeah, their software looks primitive compared to SL. But they appear to be dedicated to building an open metaverse, not a walled garden.

EDIT:

Here is my experience with VOS. I had to download the .22 version of their client. I couldn't get the .23 version to run at all. When I started the .22 client, I just saw a blank window where the world should be. The client has a URL bar at the top where I suppose you can type in world URLs. The client comes with exactly one world URL pre-bookmarked. I tried that URL. The client said "connecting..." I waited and waited. I never saw a world appear. The client just kept "connecting..." I went looking for world URLs on the VOS website and couldn't find any. I GOOGLED for VOS world URLs and couldnt find any. I checked the VOS manual and WIKI looking for world URLs and couldn't find any. I noticed that the VOS website mentions a VOS IRC channel. Maybe they can provide world URLs there. Ah, the hell with it. I gave up in frustration and went to build in SL.

So much for the open source metaverse. Thanks, Linden Lab, for providing a world that is easy, available and that actually works.

Maybe try croquet.
http://croquetproject.org/

I got into VOS with:
vip://interreality.org/world

Also, did you notice the screenshots here:

http://interreality.org/screenshots

They had a few pretty builds in there, but the pretty ones were all at localhost addresses! The only public one shown was the crappy three-prim world I mentioned above. This thing has a long way to go but it's worth keeping an eye on.

It's a real shame so many companies and people don't just work TOGETHER to create the "metaverse"/"multiverse"/whateverse. All this reinventing the wheel is getting annoying and frustrating. Game companies are even worse. Just look at all the 3D engines (245)! (Second Life USED to be there but it was removed for some reason.) If they would all just work on a SINGLE 3D engine instead of mindlessly rehashing features and wasting development time unnecessarily, we'd probably already HAVE the meta-/multi-/whateverse by now. Too many professors "calling for papers" in the 1990s and not enough actual organization and venture capital. Look at Active Worlds, There, and now SL. Hell, even VRML didn't make it. It's freakin' pathetic! What is it going to take for COLLABORATION instead of COMPETITION?!?!

Shit, what a revelation. Maybe all the big chain retail stores should do the same. Home Depot, Lowe's and Ace Hardware should all merge. They all do the same thing. Same with Burger King, McDonalds and even Kentucky Fried Chicken. CRAP CRAP CRAP. WHY WHY. IDIOTS. Everyone is CRAZY! It'll save more space everywhere. Don't they have ANY BRAINS???

mmmmmm kentucky fried mcwhoppers!

*drools*

When there are stores that offer as much variety in their products as a 3D engine does, and there are 245 different chains, THEN you might have a valid analogy. If there were only 3 competitors it might be a different story, but there aren't when it comes to 3D engines or even VR.

And, yes, fast foods offering similar food IS stupid. We have too MUCH choice and a highly saturated market.

It's good to know there are people out there who think about the development of the metaverse, and how it's the future of the internet. I take my hat off to you. The origins of the World-Wide-Web was founded on the idea of providing digital connection to everybody, everywhere... a very open hearted and generous proposition... a dream that came true. Now, we have so many companies in competition with each other that they fail to recognise the simple fact that they are striving for a common goal.

In day to day life, if you had the task of moving a pile of rubble from A to B, and somebody near you was faced with the same challenge, logic would prevail and you'd join together to lighten the burden... make the work easier... not only would you get the rubble moved alot quicker, but you'd use less energy in the process, and probably make a friend as a result...

If only these companies could see that they're striving for the same thing...

Last I checked you could buy a screwdriver and paint at Lowes, screws and light bulbs at Ace Hardware, and lamps and paintbrushes at Home Depot, and they all work together.

Similarly, Internet Explorer and Opera and Safari and Firefox all do their own implementations of HTML, but they all work together pretty well. When someone like Microsoft or Netscape does something gratuitously incompatible, they get rightly criticized for it.

When Microsoft decided to come out with DirectX to counter OpenGL, or when companies went their own incompatible ways during the UNIX wars, whether they won or not we all lost.

See, it's not just that there's all these different graphics engines, it's that they're none of them communicating with each other.

I'd just like to say I find it mildly amusing that there is something called ter'angreal in this... unless there's another usage for this term, the only place i've ever seen it is in Robert Jordan's books The Wheel of Time

I'm going to throw this out there:

The vast majority of the humans on earth can't even cope with the basic internet, let alone the metaverse. This is largely due to economic and social factors. Why do we keep pushing technology so fast --- but we don't take the time to work out the social ramifications?

My inner geek is personally pretty happy with SL as an immersive experience and would just like to see the social side of the technology sorted out faster then the graphics side.

Nail on the head this is. Include physic's engines in the standards we must.

THANK YOU! I knew it sounded familiar but I was too wool-headed to remember. Ah well, the wheel weaves as the wheel wills.

And a 3D model specification.

Followed by a Kentucky Fried McHeart Attack

I've got a great idea! Merge fast food chains with hospital chains so that when you keel over after your McHeart Attack, the hospital can send a health care professional right to your table with a McDefibrillator

mmm, can I have pie on mine?

Hey guys, I'm one of the developers and founders of Interreality. Thanks for trying out interreality and Ter'Angreal. The main reasons that the graphics still suck is that there are two main developers working on it in our spare time and we are programmers not 3D modelers! (Note we are not a company.) Hopefully we will make another release soon that works slighly better and has a few slightly better worlds. We would love to eventually have some of the capabilities as SL but are still far from it. If anyone wants to help make better worlds for Interreality the best tool to use right now is Blender, or use 3D Max and export an ASE file. Talk to us about that if you're interested, since there are some things to know doing that. Ideally we want to inter-operate with Second Life. One way to start that is if someone knows how to save prims out from SL to files and knows that format, and wants to write a converter component.

Please report bugs or problems! If we don't know about them we can't fix them!

Note, we began working on our system several years before SL, and have been focusing on creating a scalable and open under-the-hood technology, which, rather than being a "walled garden", is in fact intended to be used to build an unlimited network of interlinked gardens, with each world owner having full control over their own world running on their own server (or some third-party server). In fact, the underlying technology is a general purpose system. Our website runs off of it. We have spent these years really trying to perfect the design of that system. It's of course never "perfect" for everything but we pretty much have it where we want it and are now just starting to work on making Ter'Angreal not suck and making better content.

Yes, Ter'Angreal was borrowed from the Wheel of Time books!

The best place to get help running TerAngreal, or just to talk, is on the mailing list at http://interreality.org/lists.



-- VOS Developer

Thomas, why not work WITH LL instead of AGAINST them? If you've been developing Interreality for several YEARS before SL came out, why didn't you approach LL durings its development? I see your join date is only 1/15/05--how could you not have known about SL sooner?? That's just odd. Anyway, why don't you approach LL and see about merging technologies or something? It's probably too late now but, perhaps, at the very least, a dialog between you and LL could get going about where SL and Interreality are heading towards or something.

The word needs to get out: COLLABORATION INSTEAD OF COMPETITION!

Hi Eep. We didn't know about SL until we had done a lot of work and wanted to (and still want to) follow through with it (and yes, I don't spend much time in SL; my time is limited enough as is, very unfortunately). Our design and philosophy is very different from SL and there probably would have been no way to cooperate early on other than to drasticly change both of our designs (and each for the worse, probably). What can I say, we're pretty attached to our project too

LL has lots of stake in keeping their technology proprietary and maintaining control over SL -- for one thing with a truly open system the SL land market could not really exist as it does.

I appreciate the comments about interoperation and collaboration, but it is hard with things like this. Supporting common file formats is easy, but at the runtime interaction level, systems are far too different; synchronizing them live is not impossible, but it will take a lot of work. Perhaps someone will be able to do it someday, but probably not in the near future.