IBM and Linden Lab's Official Announcement

We reported earlier on the early announcement of IBM's plans with Linden Lab to create 3D Internet standards. The partnership has now been officially announced, with more specific plans on what the goals are for making virtual worlds interoperable:

• "Universal" Avatars:  "Users could maintain the same "avatar" name, appearance and other important attributes (digital assets, identity certificates, and more) for multiple worlds."
• Security-rich Transactions that allow users to exchange assets both more securely in individual virtual worlds, but also across multiple worlds.
• Platform stability: As a part of this goal, IBM also announced that Kaneva would be standardizing across IBM servers. More generally the goal is to "accelerate user adoption, deliver faster response times for real-world interactions, and provide for high-volume business use."
• Integration with existing Web and business processes: "Regardless of their source," IBM wants to allow existing business applications and data repositories interact with virtual worlds to make business adoption more feasible.
• Open standards for interoperability with the current Web: The two want to create open source development of open standards to connect virtual worlds in a way similar to the way users move across the Web.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - 10 Oct 2007:  IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Linden Lab®, creator of the virtual world Second Life® (www.secondlife.com), today announced the intent to develop new technologies and methodologies based on open standards that will help advance the future of 3D virtual worlds.

IBM and Linden in Push for Open, Integrated 3-D 'Net: Two IBM employees -- represented by their 3-D avatars -- have a discussion prior to a business meeting at the IBM Open Source and Standards office in the virtual world Second Life. IBM and Linden Labs today announced they will work with a broad community of partners to drive open standards and interoperability to enable avatars -- the online persona of visitors to these online worlds -- to move from one virtual world to another with ease, much like you can move from one website to another on the Internet today. The companies see many applications of virtual world technology for business and society in commerce, collaboration, education, training and more.

As more enterprises and consumers explore the 3D Internet, the ecosystem of virtual world hosts, application providers, and IT vendors need to offer a variety of standards-based solutions in order to meet end user requirements. To support this, IBM and Linden Lab are committed to exploring the interoperability of virtual world platforms and technologies, and plan to work with industry-wide efforts to further expand the capabilities of virtual worlds.

"As the 3D Internet becomes more integrated with the current Web, we see users demanding more from these environments and desiring virtual worlds that are fit for business," said Colin Parris, vice president, Digital Convergence, IBM. "BM and Linden Lab's working together can help accelerate the use and further development of common standards and tools that will contribute to this new environment."

"We have built the Second Life Grid as part of the evolution of the Internet," said Ginsu Yoon, vice president, Business Affairs, Linden Lab. "Linden and IBM shares a vision that interoperability is key to the continued expansion of the 3D Internet, and that this tighter integration will benefit the entire industry. Our open source development of interoperable formats and protocols will accelerate the growth and adoption of all virtual worlds."

IBM and Linden Lab plan to work together on issues concerning the integration of virtual worlds with the current Web; driving security-rich transactions of virtual goods and services; working with the industry to enable interoperability between various virtual worlds; and building more stability and high quality of service into virtual world platforms. These are expected to be key characteristics facing organizations which want to take advantage of virtual worlds for commerce, collaboration, education and other business applications.

More specifically, IBM and Linden Lab plan to collaborate on:

    * "Universal" Avatars: Exploring technology and standards for users of the 3D Internet to seamlessly travel between different virtual worlds. Users could maintain the same “avatar” name, appearance and other important attributes (digital assets, identity certificates, and more) for multiple worlds. The adoption of a universal “avatar” and associated services are a possible first step toward the creation of a truly interoperable 3D Internet.

    * Security-rich Transactions: Collaborating on the requirements for standards-based software designed to enable the security-rich exchange of assets in and across virtual worlds. This could allow users to perform purchases or sales with other people in virtual worlds for digital assets including 3D models, music, and media, in an environment with robust security and reliability features.

    * Platform stability: Making interfaces easier to use in order to accelerate user adoption, deliver faster response times for real-world interactions and provide for high-volume business use.

    * Integration with existing Web and business processes: Allowing current business applications and data repositories – regardless of their source – to function in virtual worlds is anticipated to help enable widespread adoption and rapid dissemination of business capabilities for the 3D Internet.

    * Open standards for interoperability with the current Web: Open source development of interoperable formats and protocols. Open standards in this area are expected to allow virtual worlds to connect together so that users can cross from one world to another, just like they can go from one web page to another on the Internet today.

IBM is actively working with a number of companies in the IT and virtual world community on the development of standards-based technologies. This week IBM hosted an industry wide meeting to discuss virtual world interoperability, the role of standards andthe potential of forming an industry wide consortium open to all. This meeting is expected to also begin to address the technical challenges of interoperability and required and recommended standards. 

Linden Lab has formed an Architecture Working Group that describes the roadmap for the development of the Second Life Grid. This open collaboration with the community allows users of Second Life to help define the direction of an interoperable, Internet-scale architecture.

For more information about the Second Life Grid visit http://secondlifegrid.net/. The Second Life community maintains information about the Architecture Working Group at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Architecture_Working_Group.
About IBM
For more information about IBM, please visit www.ibm.com.

About Second Life
Second Life is a 3D online world with a rapidly growing population from 100 countries around the globe, in which the Residents themselves create and build the world, which includes homes, vehicles, nightclubs, stores, landscapes and clothing.

The Second Life Grid is a sophisticated development platform created by Linden Lab, a company founded in 1999 by Philip Rosedale, to create a revolutionary new form of shared 3D experience. The former CTO of RealNetworks, Rosedale pioneered the development of many of today’s streaming media technologies, including RealVideo. In April 2003, noted software pioneer Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, was named Chairman. Based in San Francisco, Linden Lab employs a senior team bringing together deep expertise in physics, 3D graphics and networking.
Note to editors: Second Life® and Linden Lab® are registered trademarks of Linden Research, Inc.

Comments

[rikomatic]

This is enormous news. It will be fascinating to see the vast resources of IBM put to work on some of the immense scaling issues of Second Life. And the emphasis on interoperability and open standards is very welcome news.

[Sered Woollahra]

Let's hope IBM and Linden Labs succeed in getting enough other businesses on board as well. This could be a breakthrough partnership!

[Aleister Kronos]

Sorry - but I am just going to have to rip this off and re-post on my blog too. This is great news. I would like to know if this is being tied in to the Architecture Group work, or is a separate initiative. I'm assuming/hoping the answer is "yes"

Regarding getting other businesses involved - it should be illuminating to see how VW'07 pans out. At least 2 chinese VW companies are talking about interoperation - and are at the event.

[In Kenzo]

Wow. Exciting! Thanks for getting this done and coming together on projects that can help us all grow.

[Camille Serpentine]

I didn't join SL to have my business/personal information go cross platform.
I joined to escape reality.. not have it follow me place to place.

I find this news to be a detriment to the creative process.

[Hypnotron]

Another attempt at a universal Passport?

This is bad news and it will cause Second Life to get bogged down whilst another propietary virutal environment comes along.

You don't need these "standard bodies" trying to push their visions onto people. In the old days, email, irc, ftp, and various other communications protocols were designed by individuals or small groups (often within corporations) and then just submitted as RFC's so that anyone else could review it and implement it.

No patents. Completely open.

[Markus (Pham Neutra)]

I think the announcement is great and will be seen by many as a kind of accolade for virtual worlds technology. I would not hold my breath for any quick results, though. Interoperability is NOT achieved by technical standards alone (they are an important foundation, though). Virtual worlds will be much more diverse in many ways, than some business people (who sometimes tend to forget that these platforms are used for entertainment purposes first) envision. I partly aggree with Camille here.

I would like it to cross more easily between different virtual worlds (and the web), of course. I am not sure, how much of my avatar (besides the name) and of my virtual posessions I will be able to take with me. :)

Some reasoning behind these doubts here:
http://otherland.blogs.com/group/2007/10/ibm-give-second.html

[Len Bullard]

Information wants to be free.
Art wants to survive.

The author's sun is the language.
The platform distributes.

If the bargain is to use the tools to host on the site, the author demands a language or when the tools goes, so goes the expression.

Our history shows this. If the language had not been the basis for the VRML97 design, no expression of it would still be working twelve years later.

But VRML97 still does. X3D extends the power and range of integratibility of the VRML97 scene graph without losing the VRML. This has proceeded unbroken because care was taken in the language design to keep the existing content alive.

Isn't that marvelous?

IP-free unencumbered application of the language is the contract between the tool and the author. This frees expression from the tool and this is the freedom we as artists DEMAND.

A sun is the free energy of a universe. A language as generative tool is the free energy of our minds. A tool is and only ever is a means to express the language.

A sun gives warmth.
And it takes your life.
A language remembers.

[Prokofy Neva]

Tell me. Is this interoperability stuff really about the people who sell interop widgets needing to sell those widgets?

No, information doesn't want to be free all the time, because no one will pay for it to go on being free for ever. That's what the extremists need to understand. Information can go on being free all it likes, but it's going to get pretty hungry when everybody stops paying for its lunch.

Any conversation among giant companies, among businesses and game gods and virtual world makers is in theory a good thing, but it's one that the public does have to be leery of because public interests are not represented. Under the guise of technical interoperability, all kinds of social and political polices and diktats get set that will be awfully hard to undo later, given the propensity for secrecy and tendency toward hegemony one already sees in the IT world.

Sure, the project of the Metaverse is ambitious and difficult enough that there is reason to propose that it be about open-source technology and cooperation, to barn-raise the edifice that otherwise would be too daunting for individual companies.

But who pays? You can't just crowdsource geeks of wildly different abilities, knowledge and ethics levels off the Internet -- or rather, you can, but then you get Copybot, Megaprim, and God-stalk Mode. There has to be some attention to the the *people* who are supposed to be *using* all this, not just building pyramids that are ultimately only going to have dead game-gods lying in them.

The public didn't generate an articulated need to be walking through worlds or porting inventory (so that everything is Copybotized) -- that was a geek's dream. I'd like to see some hard sociological data that shows every demographic in the 40 million said to use virtual worlds wants to be able to walk between worlds -- in fact, the whole reason there isn't any 40 million, and the figure is probably more like 12 million or whatever, is because people like to have multiple, secure identities in different places and alts.

Geeks want to do it *because they can*. But just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. It's not being a FUDite and Luddite to say this; it's being practical, and saying that interoperability comes about naturally when it really needs to, without artificial forcing, and that there are far greater priorities now, like making sure governments and politicized non-state actors don't take over the governance or regulation of these worlds, to the detriment of the citizens.

There's another element to this which is about buy-in from stakeholders. The pre-meeting to Virtual Worlds 2007 had dozens of companies in it, from IBM to Metaplace to Anshe Chung Studios. Are they represented in the Lindens' press release? No. Only IBM and LL are shown as partners in a standard-setting exercise, although surely there are other companies with products that have set a better gold standard for say, grid stability, than Second Life.

While it seems as if there is a larger concept for the interop conversation to take place, articulated in Christian Renaud's keynote and mention of a "Virtual Worlds Interoperability Forum," the fact that two of the biggest players felt the need to jump ahead and thereby undercut the others is worrisome.

[len bullard]

You're not wrong, Prok, but real standards for this are useful. The business apps want the universal avatars plus identity management (an impersonate function plus something like OpenID). That market is nascent and no one knows much because it doesn't exist yet. On the other hand, with one billion on the street, the blood is in the water and the sharks are circling.

That can be a good thing. A tremendous among of education will result. You are too young to remember the US DoD CALS initiatives that preceded the emergence of the WWW. It failed to meet the goals but it paid for a lot of research and development that was folded into efforts such as XML. Money is fertilizer. Spread it around well and you get a good lawn. Concentrate it in one place and you get burned soil that you have to dig up and replace before you replant.

IBM?

IBM, a company with no virtual world products and little experience beyond experiments made by individuals, proposes to lead a group of its most fierce competitors to create standards for intereoperability based on the ideas it has gleaned from mail lists and other sources. Will this result in a standard? Not likely.

First the market doesn't know where such a standard fits given most worlds are standalone entertainment venues with light sprinklings of business that are basically meet and greet chats.

Second the companies consulted are viewer-based platforms with server side services, not language based. The technical and political challenges of creating a standard for such as fragmented market ensure it will take some time and a lot of effort. See US DoD CALS.

Third, there is already a real-time 3D ISO client standard with applications already deployed for the military and security markets with US and European government approval and vendor support.

So what exactly is IBM after other than that their clients should sign up to Second Life or Kaneva where they are selling servers?

Time. It is a play for time to divide the market until IBM has a product or a market strategy beyond "this all looks good for business". For the pioneers in X3D, IBM is about to do to them what the HTMLers did to the SGMLers until XML was created: FUD them to death.

Here is the problem: anyone who has more than a few years of experience at this knows that there is exactly one way to get neutral interoperability and data portability: a language. To develop that as a standard among the fractured market and push it through ISO where there is an existing standard means a) IBM has to kill the credibility of the standard or b) waste ISO in the same way it accused Microsoft of doing with OOXML or c) skip the standards and try to make the claim that open source = open standards.

The real prize is 3D IP. The companies IBM is been doing business with are VC-financed and they want that IP to pay off the very hefty bills for the financiers. IBM wants as much of that one billion invested as they can get. So it is in IBM's best interest to keep the market divided and distracted while it sells servers to the competitors.

For the authors, the problem is that the language IS the platform in so far as having more than one closed market for their work. For the vendors, the problem is a language for creating content is not the same as a language for creating tools to create content. In X3D, any world you build is an 'application' of X3D. Any viewer in theory can view it and if you are stingy with the scripting, they can. But an interactive drag and drop editor plus MU servers is another set of standards and languages.

And that is where the virtual world community is watching to see announcements. This will go on for some time to come, but as authors, you should get your head around this:

The Language IS the platform.

[larryr]

interesting,

the last two posts show a "standardizing of thought" between those "new to the experience" and those "old of the experience" around immersive rt3d as a media.

One questions what seems like an unworkable "new" plan, the other reports on the unworkable "past" plans.

a standard found...:)

[Randal Oulton]

Real standards are indeed useful.

However, those who argue against proprietary software always bring a smile to my face. They are always pro everything being open source and free -- until you suggest that their own hard work should be tossed into the pot, too. At which point the sputtering begins, and we are told that the question of their own income is of course, completely different.

[Randal Oulton]

and on by the way, this is very good news:

>> Integration with existing Web and business processes: Allowing current business applications and data repositories – regardless of their source – to function in virtual worlds

Trying to develop biz applications in SL in 16K of memory, and with data storage consisting ofnotecards you can't even write to, or using prim name and description as storage hacks -- well, it's just something that will make us all laugh about it a few years from now.

[Len Bullard]

Yes, Larry. But it doesn't change the nature of standards. Standards can be proprietary and non-open. See MPEG/MHEG.

That is why I tell people to vette the consortium and their participation agreements. That is where the conditions for the licensing or IP are to be found.

This is business, not religion or social engineering. Yet values about business models are still values and one has them or doesn't. It is precisely because IBM created such furor over ODF and has acted exactly contrarily regards VW that I question the consistency of their ethics.

It is easy to say that like all very large companies, they are really lots of small groups and dysfunctional, but these events have a lot of press and the executive suite (Sam Palimpsano, etc.) can't not be aware of them and still doing their jobs responsibly. In that sense, eventually he is responsible because he made the decision that IBM, a company without credentials or products or services in this marketspace, should assume a leadership role. All they have to sell is servers. Given lots of startups are appearing, they can siphon off a considerable amoung of the bubble simply by sending people on well-publicized speaking tours to acquire a patina of credibility. It's marketing not technology development or even standards development.

Linden Labs is the patsy. They are making deals with as many as they can as fast as they can. That's the business in the emergence phase of a new generation. We saw these tactics in Web 0.9 too.