Opening up the Metaverse - Here comes Web 3D

We wrote several months ago that in our view the major problem with all the various MMORPGs was that they were closed systems - Tharg the Mighty couldn't hop over from World of Warcraft to Second Life for example for a bit of lootin' and pillagin' (though its arguable who'd be doing the rapin', Second Life being what it is.... .

There is an article today in the Economist making this same point - and talking about Multiverse network, a sort of OpenID (OpenEgo?) allowing avatars to seamlessly transfer through a unified - or maybe federated? - Metaverse (the Universe ?). They call this online gaming's "Netscape Moment".

(This is the same problem that Social Nets face....how do you move your data - profile page and social nets - from say MySpace to Facebook, or all that music stuff you've built up from Last.fm to Pandora )

The interesting thing is that they've done it using open source because, in the choice between getting big or going home the only way to get big was to collaborate (as opposed to Netscape who, in time honoured IT tradition, snaffled the technology from someone else's R&D lab ) with the huge Open community.

This trend is inevitable - when my 12 year old son was born I was playing Doom and was entranced, he now programs Doom-like environments with open source software written at a Dutch university at IT club at school. Second Life last year bit the bullet and started to open itself up.

The Economist makes an interesting comparison of this movement with the OSP/ISP battle in the mid 90's - AOL had all the advertising (as does 2nd Life today), so the 'Netizens had to create an open enironment, ways for users to generate - and find - content, talk to each other etv (yes, there was intelligent life before Web 2.0).

Make platforms available in this new open system available and a new generation of "Web 3D" d
developers will emerge to build the applications

Now this is where it gets interesting.....in our view, the 2nd Lifes of this world are too complex (and Habbo probably too simple) for the mainstream user - but given the opportunity, a darwinian world of "Web 3D" developers will find the sweet spot.

The issue in the '90's was that the 'Netizens couldn't get into AOL et al, but once people started to find enough good stuff outside the walls soon were breached - from the rush within to get out. You couldn't go from AOL to CompuServe, but you could go to the 'Net.

So Tharg the Mighty will probably never get to Second Life, but voyages aplenty await to the Open Isles of the new Cyberworld.

Afterthought...there is an implicit assumption that such an open world will be played on a PC. This is not necessarily so - a PS3 is perfectly capable (cyclewise) to run such games, and with its ability to run Linux could be part of this movement. We have also been experimenting with playing computer games on our big screen MyPCTV rig, and its a very good experience - so we immagine an iptv / webtv exprience could be part of this movement as well.