Reading Radar

You can’t throw a rock without hitting some idiot avatar who swears that they are leaving SL for the Openlife Grid, and that the Openspace sim debacle is the end of SL. Just like the gambling ban was. And not allowing age play residents to have exhibits at SL5B. And Windlight. And voice. And changing search. And taking away popular places. And the removal of the self-appointed “truuuuuuuust me!” banks. Need I go on?

Still, it’s never a bad idea to keep on eye on other emerging virtual worlds and try them out. Not only is competition good, but in the overall scheme of things, who really believes that in 20 years it’s going to be LL’s Grid technology powering the metaverse anyway? Not me. Note that I said 20 years because frankly, they’ve got such a head start on anyone else that no one outside of Google is going to present a real challenge anytime soon, and only then if Google can ditch the overly exaggerated cartoonish feel of their crap and try to get serious for a moment. I’m pretty much bluntly stating here that although the other SL-technology based grids are interesting, I expect them too to go the way of the dodo and get bypassed by some totally new platform just as I expect SL will at some point.

Putting aside my predictions for the future, I decided to go back into Openlife Grid, an OpenSim based VW, after having created an account a long time ago and never having done anything with it. OpenSim is basically a VW platform that reverse-engineered the SL server technology as best they could, so in theory they are compatible, and in fact LL and IBM managed to teleport an avatar between SL and an OpenSim server in a hugely momentous event that maybe ten people actually understood the significance of.

I chose Openlife Grid because it’s probably the most well known and oft-mentioned of the opensim grids, and this is probably because it’s the most well developed so far. There’s a list of OpenSim grids on opensimulator.org, and frankly, some of these things are there just because they can be. Talk about Joe’s Bait Shop and 3d cartoon world. Openlife Grid may be a tiny group of people and their grid may be creaky in contrast to SL’s, but they make the rest of OpenSim grids look like a screenshot of something that might possibly be rendered in 3d. Maybe. If you squint real hard. Of the OpenSim worlds, seriously, you may as well ignore all of them besides Openlife Grid. The others are the 90’s web homepage of the metaverse.

So, on to Openlife. I’d created an Openlife account back in February of this year, and never really did much with it except get the name Radar Masukami to keep Crap Mariner from doing it so he could run all over the grid calling people perverts. I think I’d logged in once or twice and stood there for 5 minutes. I figured enough time had passed that it would be like a whole new experience. Starting next blog post, Round 1 of the Openlife experience.