Living in the Metaverse
gonzo phenomenology of virtual worlds
Last week we talked a bit about OpenSim Project and about some of the good things that are expected to come with it. But not everything is easy in the quest of having the free grid. Beside technical issues there are some that cannot be done in code. In distributed system like this one is, question is who's gonna keep our treasure chests safe, and how we are going to carry them in our journeys.
Vint put it so nicely:
I’m not a materialistic person, I claim. Yet I am grown attached to my guns, clothes, skins, clublights, skybox, … . I feel like somehow they define ‘Vint Falken’ as much as what I write here does.
Inventory is not just our possessions in second life. It is, for each and every of us, our identity. Inventory is not just clothes, weapons, vehicles and nice stuff. It is our shapes, skins and eyes. It is the appearance. And clothes and other stuff, they matters more than in the first life. One can lose all the possessions in the meatspace and not to lose identity. In second life content of those messy folders is the significant part of the identity.
So, if we are to have real metaverse, if we want to move freely from one grid to another, we need to carry our luggage with us. But , inventories are stored on the server. That means, on each grid one have a different inventory, and one cannot access the inventory of one grid from the other. Not until there is a common and trustable authentication system.
There is also, a question of names. I don't want to change my name with every transgrid teleporting. I want to remain dandellion Kimban on Linden's grid, DeepGrid and OSGrid. And on any other grid that will appear in the months to come. Right now it is impossible, but just imagine somebody registering as Philip Linden on one of the grids. This may have a solution proposed by Vint in the article mentioned above. There is an OpenID system dedicated to second life already. Maybe, just maybe, it can be a way to avoid confusion and possible frauds.
But, the real hell comes with money. The same as inventory, our money is stored in the database of the grid. It doesn't take much to see that money is not to be stored on servers of different grids. As Dalien Talbot said when we talked about OpenSim:
Since the data is sent to the client from the server, you have a problem if the server you connect to is "untrustworthy". With Lindens it is solved easily - all the servers are "known good". well, when they are up :) With the (administratively) distributed system it becomes much more interesting.
Who is going to keep our money? Couple of months ago, Anshe Chung announced the financial market for micro-currencies of different virtual worlds, namely Second Life, Entropia and IMVU. It seems that different currencies for different grids are necessity. In that scenario, stock market and exchange offices are necessity too. We will have banks once again. This time not Ginko and pyramidal schemes but serious financial institutions.
Sure, all this things are yet to come. OpenSim is in early development phase and it may sound crazy to talk about all this when all the visitors of open sims are in Ruth shape. But, it is not a bad idea to start thinking. Now coders are busy. Very soon, content creators will be needed to give us bodies more attractive than Ruth's, skins which are not just plain color and some seductive clothes. And then, we'll need economists, lawyers, and hell lot of different wise asses to plug the free new world(s) into existing metaverse. So, start thinking. Now!
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13 Responses for "Problems Of The OpenSim"
Wow. Nice wrap up/overview. I imagine out of all those problems, ‘currency’ becoming the biggest one. If by then RL laws didn’t start regulating virtual currencies in some way which you need to take in account, then also there will always be persons trying to take abuse of such system. Even if it’s open source etc. Long live mankind and it’s greed. :p
As I got it, RL can ask for taxes on micro-currency only when it is transfered to hard RL cash. Sure, somebody can make a very profitable business of exchange institution. But, that is ok.
I still think inventories are the biggest problems. Do you bvelieve that LL will give access to their servers just for the inventories. No, they won’t. Nobody will. They cannot be stored localy because then we can forget about permissions, everything would be copy/mod/trans without exeption. Making independent systems to store inv’s is a step which requires reworking of the complete system. Same as with the names, but names are much smaller database and we can hope that LL would make that move. And inv database is expected to to be datavbase with hell of a bandwidth.
Thinking about all that, there is a queswtion who will handle IM’s. Probably the names db.
Well, my approach to this is more radical. If you take money and purchased content out of the equation (basically living on full perm objects and gadgets), you can carry them locally, and when you arrive at a sim, you upload the necessary content (shape, attachments, etc.) to the server and the server can play temporary asset server for anybody else displaying your avatar when in visual proximity.
You can already decently live on freebies in SL (probably not as cute as spending money in shops), and this would be a good start OpenSIM. Better than standard Ruth anyway.
If I can’t take it with me, I’m not going. Period.
Dandellion, that’s why I thought of the ‘pay to host Db’. You can use open source software, but it’s not worth much if it runs on a crappy PC or crappy hosting space. So the same for OpenGrid. Free Db hosting that is crappy and with publicity (privat initiatives too) and then who choose to host their own inventory and have good services depending on their choice and the money they want to spend?
Local: that means moving it to other pc’s a lot. And not being able to ‘full functioning’ login from - for instance - a friend’s pc?
Seraphine: We’ll kidnap you! ;)
But then, who will certificate the hosts? Who/what will guarantee that inventory is “safe” (now, this sounds ridicilous - “safe inventory”), meaning that permissions will stay untouched, that server won’t deliver raw images of textures, content of protected scripts, etc…
*searches her inventory for griefing cage for Sera*
I’ve been thinking on this, and I think PGP-like approach solves the problem. you start the game with a few folks. Only those who know those can join. Rinse, repeat.
In the end you get a social network which would be cryptographically “signed”. Any antisocial behaviour can be traced to the nearest “good” spot, and then the “bad branch” be dealt with….
hmmm…. I am not sure to which extent this could work… Sure, it will not be enough to deal with the money, but inventories maybe can be handled that way. But, I guess that lot of things would be handled by having a reliable company or organization behind the specific grid.
One of my hopes is in the openness of the code.
Well, the “locally” is relative … put them on a memory stick. There are already projects where you can put your PC desktop on a stick and what better metaphor than carrying your inventory (basically yourself) with you?
I meant localy as on local computer, but now when you mentioned, it includes carrying it on USB stick.
Hmmm… I could put my SL folder to stick with firefox and abiword. Is there live version of SL client for win too?
Just replaying to this as OpenID has been evoked by the AWG recently.
The money problem can be solved very easily by an existing, working, open source software and payment solution called Ripple, or any other form of social network credit (Hawala).
I respect Anshe, but money and payment markets do not appear just of announcement, and if she were doing that job in background, it would be known (not necessarily visible to public, tho)… my presumption she would (most probably) fail on currencies and other financials.
Obviously, she is not doing it. She is converting currencies of virtual worlds she is present in into US$ and euro and that is all. It will take a serious financial institution but the one that is willing to deal with small amounts we use.
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