It's pretty interesting. Might be a little old now
so maybe you've seen it already? On how he started:
"Harvey developed his first game at age 15, after teaching himself assembly language on his Apple II. He has never stopped. While earning his bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford, he founded several game companies that have produced platinum and gold game titles including Zany Golf, Immortal, and Music Construction Set. He has filed five patents related to networking, graphics, and automated scheduling. "
On sim handovers:
"What's actually happening is that your front end initially is logged into the sector that you are in, and as you drive from that geographical region to the neighboring geographical region, in advance of hitting that line in between, your client will log into the neighboring server as well, so now it's logged into two servers and beginning simultaneous streams from both servers.
"Meanwhile, in the back end, the action is being simulated on both computers for a certain overlapping period of time, and then once you're safely in the new region, you can drop the earlier connection."
On scripting language:
"Yes, we use variants of Lua. We call it "ThereScript." It's Lua plus whatever functions we've added to it."
On the S-word:
"Second Life is an environment where people can build things. It's technically demanding. It's a different market from There's market, which is people who want to hang out with their friends. Some of them want to build stuff that will be interesting to other people, but the appeal of There is to people who want to socialize, not specifically to people who want to build things."
On the future of There:
"Technically, the difficulty for There is that we want to build a platform to enable a virtual world in which many developers, not just us, are able to create the content of the world. So we need to invent that platform. At the same time, we have commercial demands for being a viable business to have the content for that platform."
Azelda