POOLEY STAGE: Zero Linden thought it would be his normal quiet office hour yesterday in Grasmere. But when 40 people arrived with many more yelling to get in to hear information about the Architecture Working Group (AWG), the meeting was moved to Pooley Stage. The four adjoining sims held 85 members who encouraged Zero to continue speaking as he was griefed by marijuana leaves, flying boxes and finally a house landing on him.

Earlier this month, IBM and Linden Lab released an announcement and held a press conference in SL indicating an agreement between these two entities to work together to create interoperability standards. These protocol standards would potentially enable creation of universal avatars able to travel between many virtual worlds. It is also likely that the standards would facilitate the creation of objects in one virtual world and selling or using them in another.

Zero announced that an industry group is forming to look at and address the interoperability standards. Residents are welcome to join in this work at the wiki page.

Many residents inquired whether IBM will help to improve SL, fixing bugs or boosting performance of the code. Zero assured them that IBM was not coming to SL’s technical aid, commenting “If you are asking if there is some underside – swooping in of IBM engineers at the Linden Lab HQs: no, there isn’t.”

Zero clarified key definitions of interoperability and scalability as they related to AWG. “Interoperability means making a SL that can have regions run outside of LL with separate implementations and it means having agent domains that are run outside of LL with separate implementations. As far as scalability, the grid itself must scale to the number of agents, regions and online that I’ve outlined.”

Protocols must be supportive of both alternative implementations and future expansion. Zero discussed this point: “Right now the protocols for handling agents could perhaps handle 200 or so, but beyond that we need some major new concepts of how to handle agents in a close space. AWG isn’t going to do that out of the starting gate.”

The AWG’s beginnings and continuing progress have been documented on a wiki page.

“The AWG is on the one hand a much less ambitious effort, and on the other, the biggest thing that could happen in SL. It is less ambitious in that it is tackling only one view of what will be an Internet-wide Metaverse: take SL and make it work with 60 million regions, most run by non-LL entities. On the other hand, it is a much more concrete objective than other groups may be contemplating at this time,” Zero said.

Zero continued “I want the AWG to help LL get the current protocol set of SL into a form that can be opened up and interoperate with efforts like OpenSim and LibSL.”

Zero and Rob Linden will be editing the AWG wiki significantly, moving things that are out of scope to other locations. Rob added “The protocol is going to be open, just not designed by absolute consensus.” “At this stage, our goal is to get to interoperable implementations of the SL grid,” Zero said. “I want and need your input and your hard work, but we need to be able to limit scope and goals.”