With just over two years of development and community effort,
OpenSimulator, (or Opensim as it is known) has grown into a feature
rich and reasonably stable platform. This is a great credit to the
many developers and contributors who have invested thousands of
hours of their own time to achieve such a huge undertaking - a
truly open source virtual world platform. Well done! But of course,
there is always more...
In this article I will examine the possible future directions
for the platform from the perspective of both commercial and
private users. The conclusions drawn here are based on forums,
mailing lists, work with the German Osgrid/Opensim community and
from talks with potential users as an IT Professional. Please bear
with me for some comparisons with Second Life®
- this is for historical reasons and to better understand the
private market.
Limiting factors...
While Opensim has no intention of becoming a replacement for
Second Life, the comparison does provide us with a useful industry
benchmark. Many private users are seeking an alternative
for Second Life, this is not because SL is bad it is largely
motivated by cost and a desire for a more flexible avenue to
channel their creative energy - Opensim gives these users the
flexibility to do whatever they like and not be limited by prims or
region restrictions, with total control over their own environments
Opensim users are free to do whatever they please without breaking
the bank to own a region or two. However, OSGrid is still a very
small community so for users who are seeking that "social" element
they may be better waiting a little while (although if you come and
visit us we wont byte you ;-).
Another likely group of early adopters are the special-interest
groups (SIGs) - some already owning over 100 regions in Second Life
- the major issues are the still missing group functionality
and some of the unimplemented LSL-functions, mostly those dealing
with vehicles and physics. SIGs need such features for
role-playing, sailing and group management. Opensim is extremely
appealing to SIGs with large land holding needs mainly because
these are typically run "for fun" so any reduction in costs in
these recession wary times is likely a good thing and will lead to
continuation and growth of these projects.
Professional users need an integrated voice solution if they are
into training/collaboration - and application collaboration based
on major standards like RDP, Citrix and NX. VNC may be a temporary
workaround for this. An true in-world browser will be a must in the
future, which will allow multiple users to all share the same
browser. Early tests have proven successful and a great
VNC how-to was recently written by Jani (based on realXtend).
However this is very much in it's infancy and definitely needs work
to make it truly acceptable for commercial applications.
With OSGrid as the biggest open grid platform, language is still
a problem. While there are some user groups in different
languages, it is very difficult to find information to get started
with - especially if you do not speak or read English. While
typically region implementors have geek backgrounds and some
understanding of English, many of the actuall potential users may
not have
The lack of all this especially for the private user, is
represented by the osgrid statistics over the last month:
As you can see there is plenty of interest
from new users - but typically the first experiences can be
somewhat crude for many SL users, so the count on unique user
visits and regions only rises slowly.
Skepticism...
Potential adopters are skeptical about security and economics of
opensim, in relation to Second Life. While the topic was covered in
an earlier article (
Content Security in Virtual Worlds), many think Second Life
gives creators a higher level of control. Right now people tend to
stop a discussion, if it comes to the point where a business
(in-world) needs to follow rules (transaction history, consumer
rights, licensing etc) or needs to start a case at court.
It is interesting that while developers continue to discuss and
improve the security issues (which is great) a fully fledged
trusted stack or rights management is still far away.
Since you can host your own server - even disconnected from any
grid as a hypergrid node, or rent a region from someone you trust,
the fear of region- and/or grid operators stealing content seems to
be overdone. A major risk right now is the unencrypted
transmission, which could be cured by https and as Opensim is
https-aware, it should be possible to fix this. Just like secure
websites, we fully expect that a "Trusted Regions" scheme will
eventually come into play and it will be through these trusted
regions that financial transactions can take place
When thinking about protecting content it is interesting that
no-one so far found that as a market opportunity and just copy the
real life idea of license granting server to make products more
secure.
However - we see several options to establish economics. Namely
there is a basic module inside opensim, which is interesting for
people building their own (closed) grids and can expand this. In a
few months we will see virtual wallet spread, like a purse to carry
virtual money between grids. It comes with a rich set of scripts
for adoption in own vendors etc. Lastly, Deepgrid have already
developed secure and Hypergrid aware module as detailed in Adam
Frisby's article :
Securing currency exchange in an open environment.
There are means by which the problem can be addressed
technically. There are usual commercial practices to reduce the
problem. There is even a market and potential solutions for
"license enforcement". Maybe the only thing missing is some
enlightment from lawyer's side, maybe some articles on the
different views of this multinational challenge.
Next wave...
The next wave of Opensim adopters is expected when Linden Labs
increases their pricing for Open Space/Void regions in July. This
will likely result in many people searching for lower cost
alternatives to continue their private virtual lives.
This means at the end, there are more and more people using
alternative grids - and asking for goods and services. This will be
a major step to markets and content providers (builders, scripters)
should prepare for being available at the customers places, or to
lose turnover.
Development plan...
From the development side, the primary goal for 2009 is to reach
version 1.0/Beta. The version here is kind of a multiplicator of
the Second Life functionality. So, with 1.0 opensim will cover
the majority of SL's functionality, with opensim-specific modules
and add-ons such as Hypergrid.
On the other hand - for some usage scenarios the functionality
already in place works well. IBM recently release a closed
beta for Sametime 3D, there are commercial grids - and for some
educational scenarios, a simpler interface would even be needed.
3Di have made a step in the right direction by releasing a browser-based viewer.
A common misunderstanding is that Opensim is aimed at being a
like-for-like replacement of Second Life - this is not the case -
there are a huge range of things going on besides Second life
Compatibility. For customer or developer this is a big playground
to bring in new ideas. It is one of the bigger and maybe even well
known multiplatform projects based on C# - some projects are even
supported by Microsoft or Novell. This attracts people itself.
While opensim was planned with second life compatibility in mind,
it was not planned as a cheap alternative - more like a 3D virtual
world development framework. Interestingly, unlike Linden Labs
which is somewhat locked-in by their development process and the
need to satisfy their business model, the dynamic nature of the
OpenSimulator community-driven development approach means that new
ideas and technologies can be implemented quickly and
experimentally - this is where great initiatives like hypergrid and
ninja physics come from.
The vision of a "3D Apache" as described by Wagner James Au (
An Introduction to Opensim: the "Apache of Virtual Worlds")
seems to be coming closer and closer every day...
A technical advantage...
While Second Life is still (for sure, not forever -
Second Life lives behind a firewall) limited to a hosted
service, not offering hypegrid and accepting only the Lindens
Client protocol stack. The opensource community now sees Hypergrid,
alternative viewer (MXP) and even a prim/mesh mixed graphics (in
realxtend, modrex). With now even embedding the
next level scripting language (MRM) opensim clearly shows the
high speed of spreading into all directions of web 3D. Just
remember the Linden announcement back in July 2008 at Reuters
Linden prepares for an Opensim future and consider how much has
happened with Opensim since then, how much over at Second
Life...
Perspectives...
While I did not see any prediction that we will not have web 3.0
or it will not include 3D virtual reality - there is no need for it
for most companies from their view. Private users pay for their
hobby without the need for a revenue stream, however for the
overall success of the system it needs commercial users as well.
Commercial users means funding, follow-on adoption and quicker
technical improvements.
While there is no doubt, that opensim will get more and more
popular in the private sector due to Lindens 'help' if the last
issues (first time experience in some places, groups and scripting
vehicles) - Then why is the commercial market slow to take off?
Presumably this is because commercial users currently feels
no need to experiment - which is a great environment for first
mover advantages. A slogan in solution selling is "no pain,
no gain". As long as no one is doing active sales (sales =
customer is contacted to initiate a sale) and no demand is
generated (marketing = make the customer contact you to initiate
the sale) this is unlikely to grow quickly. Of course with backing
and growing interest in virtual worlds from the IT giants (
Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Intel etc ) it is only a matter of time before
we start to see much greater traction in the commercial sector.
Conclusion...
Technically, opensim (and related projects) are evolving quickly
and positively. By addressing some of the issues discussed above we
fully expect there will be many more private users and content
coming over to the Opensim platform, and in particular to
OSGrid.org.
For the business market, usage scenarios must be developed based
on business demands and rules. This use-cases need to be
understandable by the public and need to generate demand by clear
visions. For example when someone writes about lower costs, present
a realistic mathematical model. When talking about new technology
applications, be clear about advantages, disadvantages the
deployment time and materials - but this is standard stuff for
technology solutions providers. Commercial applications of Opensim
technology are really no different from commercial applications of
any other technology - just alot more fun and engaging :)
So is the Future of Opensim shiny or tiny..? We think
definitely shiny! ( But then we would say that
wouldn't we?)