Linden Discusses Internet-Wide, Cross-Platform Expansion

We've covered the open sourcing of Second Life before, but now it looks like Linden Lab has farther reaching goals than previously imagined. With the launch of SecondLIfeGrid.net, Linden is looking to massively build out the network. "We imagine a future where Second Life is able grow beyond the borders of Linden Lab," blogged Zero Linden yesterday. "We see regions running on open source, alternative simulators. We see web services that allow people to build mash-ups of Second Life and the Web. We see organizations being able to integrate their members and their members’ avatars."

All of this comes in the wake of Second Life's first Architecture Working Group meeting, organized to help scale the Second Life grid.  In the future, Linden looks to   "evolve the SL architecture into something that is Internet wide," Zero said in an office hours session, in order to support "60M regions, 2B avatar accounts, [and] maybe 50M to 100M on-line [users]."

As that happens, or perhaps in order to make that happen, Zero Linden thinks the definition of being "online" in the virtual world will change to include more light-weight applications.

"Remember that on-line might mean something more light weight in the future," said Zero. "Or at least not all of them [the users] will be mvoing around, rendering 3D space…. "They might be there as [a] sort of static - I’m here, come talk to me, mode."

In another change, Linden wants to give individual Sim owners more control over the settings and weight of their own applications, allowing for more or less graphically demanding sections of the virtual world.

"What if someone comes and says 'To be in this sim, you need a kick ass video card and 4G of memory…' Within Linden’s sim today there is very little plan to increase prim count or other major 'resource thickness'. We would so much rather get to a place where you could plug in your own sim to run your own region and play with those knobs yourself."

[Check out DizzyBanjo.wordpress.com for the full transcript.]