Tribal Media Integrates OpenSim with Facebook

Tribal Media, a developer with a focus on the OpenSim project and its own Tribal Net, has integrated the open-source virtual world with Facebook, though only at a proof-of-concept level to show one way of building immersive environments that add to instead of replacing existing communities and networks.

"Sufficient to say is that Tribal One was an experiment, showing some concepts - much like realXtend is introducing some innovative new concepts," Stefan Andersson  explained to UgoTrade. "For example: Who creates your ‘inventory’ and what are you supposed to do with that? In our concept, the ‘inventory’ is a set of services that I can use to interact with the world, i.e, I have a “pictureFrame” in my inventory that, when I drag it onto a wall, the act of dragging it onto the wall instructs the region with the wall to use that url to fetch the definition of that pictureFrame, as well as showing that pictureFrames application web page to me. And, when I interact with that web page, that web page interacts with the region to change the picture in the frame. Contrast that with the notion of an ‘inventory’ that contains a set list of stored objects that I can ‘rez’."

If the Tribal One app is installed in Facebook, users can see the Tribal One status of their friends and choose to join them or simply visit their 3D space. The space is a neat way of working with Facebook. Whenever users log in to the world, they get gardens that are automatically distributed across islands. It seems like when they log back out, though, they take their garden with them, an ad hoc room for Facebook users.

Andersson explains on his blog that users are seamlessly logged in without launching any other application and that their avatar information is drawn directly from Facebook, as is content that can be used to populate the garden. That seems like it could make it much simpler for users to get involved with the virtual world on their own terms with their own network. Tribal Media's goals are to take that even farther.

"Social games and technical innovation aside, what is needed to bring forth the 3D web revolution are good examples of business and user value - applications reaching beyond social networking bubbles and into the intranets and databases of organizations - and I believe Tribal Media has shown that we are very well suited to help bring those applications to life," Andersson told UgoTrade.

[Check out the lengthy discussion with UgoTrade for a more technical perspective.]