InDuality Brings All Worlds to One Web Browser

There's been a lot of buzz surrounding Movable Life and Ajax Life, browser apps that let users login to Second Life with limited functionality. InDuality, designed by Clive K. Jackson, CEO and Founder of Pelican Crossing, lets users log in to Second Life with full functionality--everything but changing the resolution and quitting directly from the browser--but the kicker is that it does the same thing for Club Penguin, Blink3D, and X3D with support for more on the way. "The concept here is a universal client, so one client that works with every virtual world," explained Jackson. "And it's a  virtual world that runs in a Web page. You can create your own virtual world and you can create graphical objects, just like in Second Life or There or any other virtual world, that then allow you to simply drag and drop other virtual worlds into that. Then you can include that in your Myspace page, your Facebook page, whatever social networking site you're currently working in."

Users login to the portal world, itself a 3D, multi-user environment, and then click on the icon for the world they want to visit. For a demo at Virtual Worlds Fall Conference and Expo, the worlds were linked to pylons in the middle of the street (above). Jackson and Peter Finn, IBM Senior Project Manager for Global e-Business Strategy, who brought Jackson into a partnership with IBM, plan to update the portal world to a Blink 3D mock up of Stone Henge for an upcoming conference in London.

Right now the InDuality client, still in Alpha and based on Jackson's Blink 3D, is only supported in Internet Explorer on Windows XP and Vista, with Vista coming as a new option just last Monday, but Jackson says he's close to running it in Firefox as well. Likewise the portal world could just as easily be based in Second Life, says Jackson, with any number of prims linked to other worlds.

"Anything that support linking can work," said Jackson. "Obviously different platforms will have different functionality, but we have a huge open API set that anyone can plug into."

The portal works with the virtual worlds that Jackson has tailored it for, but more platform developers approached him over the two-day conference to be included. And, helpfully, if your browser doesn't have the correct drivers and plugins loaded for the world you're visiting, the client transparently downloads them while you're entering the world.

"The end user basically has only one plugin," said Jackson. "And everything just works."

Jackson and Finn didn't want to commit to any particular business model yet, but they say it's largely altruistic. The easy access  to all the virtual worlds out there--and the hundreds  that were mentioned as in development this week--would simplify Finn's life. As a member of the IBM virtual worlds group, he's a member of 127 worlds. The group itself, which is 5000 strong, will likely use InDuality as the browser of choice. For Jackson, it's just more exposure for his Blink3D worlds. It's a similar service that Multiverse provides, connecting a wide range of small virtual worlds to the larger, established properties.

And they look amazing, too. After some exciting but glitchy login attempts through other browser-based Second Life viewers, I was skeptical about how well it would work with "full functionality." But Jackson logged in and rezzed the IBM help center as fast or faster through his laptop's browser window than I've ever done on my home desktop's client.

This doesn't make the worlds interoperable, though Finn is excited about the connections to IBM's  recent announcements on that front. However, with OpenID, users could  potentially just login to the portal world and then move seamlessly from one world to the next. Likewise, it  adds more functionality and interaction with the Web, something Linden Lab has been working on for Second Life for some time.

"You can have communications with the page to the virtual world and vice versa," said Jackson. "So the HTML page can drive the virtual world and the virtual world can drive the HTML page."

The project is still in Alpha. The next step for Jackson is to add more worlds and work on the many excited requests he received over the conference. The top three? Users want to be prompted before adding content, the ability to see who's in the virtual world before logging in, and the ability for one person to move a group en masse--the future of  Metaversed's grid safaris anyone?

Comments

[Aleister Kronos]

Aaargh! Too much input... World changing too fast... brain will bleepfart any moment!

Whew! What a week, eh?

[Aleister Kronos]

PS: Apologies for excessive use of exclamation marks, but it seemed appropriate.

[Prokofy Neva]

None of us in business will use Moveable Life on anything but an alt because it grabs a password to the actual Second Life account, and opens up your Second Life browser, thereby possessing your password.

And that's just not on, even if they are nice guys, especially if you have real sums of money on your account. You could only use it with an alt. This is so obvious that I can't understand why you aren't grappling with this problem, as Linden Lab is trying to get them to address this and everyone else who would like the ease of entry but refuses to risk their account security over it.

Oh, and even if they fix that issue, since when do I want another company grabbing my IP, tracking my log-on times, possibly even more proprietary data of mine (transaction amounts? chat?) and pwning it to use as their commercial product in some way? Why is that fine?

Seriously, these are not trivial issues, even if it is the latest groovy geeky thing. And please, don't talk to me about altruism. Knowledge is power. Grabbing everybody's attention economy is the Google of virtual worlds.

[larryr]

"Seriously, these are not trivial issues, even if it is the latest groovy geeky thing. And please, don't talk to me about altruism. Knowledge is power. Grabbing everybody's attention economy is the Google of virtual worlds."

all very true...

[Anthony Reisman]

Yes these are serious issue, but I think they can be resolved by discussing with that company what we don't like. Hopefully they will change things regarding both the login authentication and the TOS issues I mentioned in the comments on the original article.

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2007/10/3dijp-releases-.html?cid=86462396#comment-86462396

Because I really think it could be a very useful tool when you can't get inworld with a full blown client.

[Len Bullard]

The claim is they can play any virtual world regardless of the original object model? A universal client is a pretty tall order. The two must haves for real-time 3D are rendering fidelity and behavioral fidelity.

The VRML experience is that even with a pretty good specification, rendering fidelity between browsers from two different competitors will vary noticeably.

The behavioral fidelity issue is more serious. As the complexity of scripted operations goes up in any single world, the abiilty of different browsers to behave identically drops dramatically.

To mitigate these, the X3D standards specifies an object model and has a set of conformance tests. The reality is, the conformance tests are the proof of the standard and the implementation and that is for clients supporting ONE language for the object tree and mainly one internal scripting language (Javascript/Ecmascript) and both of these are languages with lots of field experience.

Now toss in a lot of variant server systems. Hmmm... AFAIK, the only way this universal browser can work is to close some avenues of technical innovation and restrict authoring severely.

It will be interesting the see the open specifications for InDuality if and when these get introduced into a standard.