So this week marks a beginning for Second Life and Linden Lab to truly start to open up second life and think about interconnected worlds and a standards for connecting them. Well, welcome boys and girls, now maybe you can throw your weight in with Intel and HP to further the standards that Croquet has been working on for years. You see Croquet has been doing exactly that for a long time (ie: being truly open source and working towards standards). For those not familiar, here is a short explanation from their site:
Croquet is a powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable. The Croquet architecture supports synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and multiple devices.
Every part of the system is designed around enabling real-time, identical interactions between groups of users. The architecture of Croquet actually makes it quite easy to develop collaborative applications without having to spend a lot of effort and expertise in understanding how replicated applications work. There are a number of simple patterns and rules to remember, but otherwise, it is quite simple to quickly develop very powerful systems. Click here for more detailed information on the technology.
So my message to you, if you’re thinking about developing metaverses and such take a close look at Croquet, they are light years ahead of Linden Labs in terms of a truly open developer standard.