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IBM and Second Life work on avatar sharing
Interoperability between different virtual worlds?

By Reuters

Published: Wednesday 10 October 2007

IBM and Linden Lab, the operator of the Second Life virtual world, have said they will work on ways to eventually let people use a single online persona in different online services.

Interoperability is emerging as a key goal of the nascent virtual world industry, which is attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in investment on hopes that videogame graphics and rich 3D environments will supplant flat web pages.

Currently, people who create a character, or avatar, in one virtual world cannot take that identity into another service.

Designing a detailed avatar can take well over an hour, so a closed system discourages customers from abandoning that investment. But it is also a barrier to growth since few people bother to start the process anew in multiple virtual worlds.

An open system would let people create one avatar that would keep the same basic appearance and customer data no matter where it was in cyberspace.

Colin Parris, IBM vice president of digital convergence, said: "It is going to happen anyway. If you think you are walled and secure, somebody will create something that's open and then people will drain themselves away as fast as possible."

Linden Lab, whose Second Life is one of the market leaders with about half a million active users, is betting that an open system will reward interesting worlds with more customers and punish dull ones with an exodus of users.

But such a virtual passport system may be years away, if it doesn't first fall prey to the kind of conflicting interests that occasionally bog down efforts to draw up standards in the fast-paced technology industry.

IBM's Parris said the effort would first focus on studying situations where the ability to travel between virtual worlds is most in demand. The nuts and bolts of how to make different software work together will come later.

IBM and Linden announced the partnership ahead of a virtual worlds conference this week in San Jose, California, which is expected to discuss the formation of industry standards and other issues.

Most participants are start-ups but the event has also attracted services and hardware heavyweights such as Cisco Systems and IBM, as well as software and entertainment giants Microsoft and Sony.

The event itself is seen as something of a coming-of-age milestone for an industry that is starting to be taken seriously as a provider of useful business tools and not just a quirky offshoot of the videogame sector.

Conference organisers say some three dozen companies that offer virtual worlds or related software and services have attracted about $200m in investment over the past year - a figure that rises to $1bn if you count Disney's purchase of kid-oriented online world Club Penguin, and Intel's acquisition of Havok, whose physics software is widely used to make virtual objects behave realistically.