[Opensim-dev] Hypergrid patch

[Cristina Videira Lopes]

Let explain  *why* I'm putting this forward as a patch.

I'm putting this as a patch because the closed-world model of virtual 
worlds does not scale to anything that I'm involved with related to VWs. 
It does not scale:

- In universities. What are we going to do? Set up our own little world? 
What for, if no one can visit? How can we make VW meetings with people 
from other universities? Unless they are very large, like Second Life 
and World of Warcraft, closed worlds are completely uninteresting for 
the librarians and the social scientists, it's a non-starter. Our local 
star VW sociologist took a look at our UCI opensim grid, said "Hmm, very 
interesting!" and rapidly went back to SL. Without global connectivity 
opensim will only be used in computer game courses... maybe.

- In commercial ventures that rely on the ability to outreach the 
public. For example, that urban planning startup I'm involved with will 
stop on its tracks if the general public can't visit. The geist of that 
company is *not* to accumulate accounts or social networks or virtual 
money; it's to show how cities look like if certain urban planning 
decisions are made. We don't want to store accounts or manage users. We 
want people to get accounts elsewhere, in SL or in your grids, and then 
visit our virtual constructions in this immersible manner that we all like.

These are the two very concrete reasons why I just went ahead and did 
the hypergrid, which didn't look very hard to do in the first place.

The hypergrid project can continue as it, as a gforge project. The 
reason why I'm submitting this as a patch is that I think this fits the 
spirit of the opensim project. I see the hypergrid as an extension of 
the core pertaining to architectures for interoperability -- one of many 
possible ways of connecting virtual worlds. It isn't the first, if you 
take OGP into account; it just happens to be the first fairly complete 
one, and one that works entirely within opensim-based worlds. But there 
are other possible architectures, including the one suggested by 
realXtend, with an avatar service, which is also very interesting. 
Rather than trying to pick only one, which is what an *application* 
would do, opensim can incorporate all of those that are reasonable, so 
that people can choose. *Frameworks* do that, like having a Net library 
with several protocols.

Crista