CyberTech News

Dear reader,                                                          

let me introduce myself as a new co-author on the CyberTech News. I have worked with virtual worlds since the end of 2004. In Second Life my more well known avatar Ralf Haifisch has been in business since 2006.

In SL, I went through all the steps from building, scripting, land speculations to running my own estates and to offer consulting services and RL-SL connecting products. I had a  swiss partner running the estates. My girlfriend was infected by the building virus as well.

In Real Life I am an IT Pro (consultant in IT-architecture, analysis and advisory – see my profile for more information) and I did run my first internet host serving our region with news, gopher and email as well as some gateways back in 1991.

The whole new world of 3D Internet fascinates me both from personal and professional view. I love what Lindens did with Second Life, but…

Rather than playing games, I am more interested in all kinds of RL business use cases for virtual worlds. In addition to that, building and terraforming a virtual world is a way to relax for me.

Over the years I collected more and more use cases for Real Life business use of virtual worlds. Second Life did not support many of them for the following reasons:

1. There is no support for 3D Internet (like with Opensim and Hypergrid, take a look at CTN article about teleporting).
   
2. the system is very homogenous and driven by Lindens only.
3. No real influence over technical things like APIs (interfaces), in case a business customer needed a change in those. You can not influence SAP R/3 codebase either, but  it is easy to find partners to customize or program a needed interface.
4. No choice of service level (well, you get support by being a premium customer). So if I run a region and want to be able to restore a backup (rollback), I will never know when it will happen. Absolutely a showstopper for RL business.
5. No local install for the system. You could develop for example a great meeting place for a company, but would be totally depending on a working infrastructure (Grid, Web, Internet provider, Internet acces, Viewer). I do not want to do a presentation in front of the top management of a company and not have the full solution locally installed. No go.
   
6. However – if I would present the SL meeting place, it would have been without voice, because the VOIP solution chosen by Lindens is not compliant to most company firewalls. Nice to play at home, but not suitable for the big game.

To clarify: I really appreciate what Lindens did and Sl is still a great place, but for 3D Web needs and business use cases it has major disadvantages.

I have played with Opensim since the early 2008 and did decide that it would possibly solve the problems. After even IBM did choose this as the platform for their upcoming 3D instant messaging, I thought I might be right.

After running around on most grids, I finally chose OSGrid. First it´s pretty close to the development, and I prefer early features and patches for the pain of anarchy and instability. More important: it is heterogonous and open. Servers are located around the world, even at peoples home. Everyone is allowed to hook up a system. Just like in the Internet right now. So to me, this is the first step into 3D web evolution. Right now I am about the top supporters for the german community and you will find me in the OSGrid and SLinfo forums. I run a german opensim howto, as well.

So – what will further posting from me bring up ?

Right now, I am researching on using opensim in heterogenous networks (which influences how to choose a hosting place and how to monitor). I do measurements on several comparable servers, locations, operating systems and collect user experiences from those. If you want to give your own feedback on the public test, I would be very happy. The results will be pretty much the next article to post here. The results are important for me in relation to a real business solution.

I am strongly interested in how to integrate payment and voice and involveld in some discussions about that.

On top, I decided to write down the first use cases wich are based on RL demand and easy to implement, because I strongly believe we need to get the first RL solutions based on Opensim to get to the next evolution step.

Cheers,

Ralf

Article represents personal opinion – trademarks apply – www.ralf-haifisch.biz

OSGrid, OpenSim