[Opensim-dev] Cable Beach trust overview

[Hurliman, John]

With everyone interested in the concept of grids and future architecture design I thought this would be a good time to present what I have been working on.

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Image:Cablebeach-trustoverview.png

The important thing about worlds (grids) and trust domains is that you can always shrink trust domains; you can have one machine hosting one region of virtual space act as its own trust domain without a problem. You can always relax your world policy and hand out membership to anyone who asks. But if you design your architecture around only this concept, you can never go back the other way. You can't create a grid where there is no strict 1:1 mapping between computing resources or domain names and spatial locality in the virtual world. Things like world inventories and economies become much more difficult to implement when you don't have a trust domain.

Having said that, I think the real features of the model are the new trust domains for identity and other services. Giving worlds the option to only connect to a trusted service, the option to talk to any service the avatar wants to bring (and it recognizes the protocol for), or any policy in between. You can imagine a point in the future where virtual worlds, data visualization demos, and MMORPGs are all built on a similar architecture.

John