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IBM, Linden Labs Call For Portable Avatars

Posted by kdawson on from the door-from-sl-to-google-earth dept.

destinyland writes "IBM just announced a push for universal avatars with Second Life's creator Linden Labs. Then they joined Google, Cisco, Intel, Sony, Microsoft, and Motorola for the first planning session on how to make it happen. There's already speculation that Google is working on a 3-D social networking environment incorporating Google Earth and Google Maps." Virtual Worlds News has up a copy of the joint press release.

3 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Just what we need by The_Mystic_For_Real · · Score: 4, Insightful
    More ways to trace you online, from the guys that brought online stalking to the mainstream.

    Different identification at different sites cuts down on spamming, trolling, phishing, everything bad out there.

    --

    _____

    Thank you.

  2. Can it be executed? by kevmatic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It would be a neat idea to "walk though a portal" in one MMO game and walk out another, but that obviously would require you to install both games, anyway.

    And having the same appearance in all games? Would anyone even WANT that? Where's the variety? I'm guessing that your avatar is transmitted by metadata (your eyes are GREEN and x big) ala Spore, but all you're saving then is the creation of the character, and it could end up wrong without hand-adjusting it. I don't think that you could carry things like clothing and armor over, so you'd just end up with different avatar with the same face.

    And you couldn't carry over in-game data (like what level you are in an RPG) unless everyone used the same basic battle engine.

    Might have a bit of use in different "Second lives," but you're gonna end up linking economies such that you end up with essentially one giant world economy with exchange rates. I guess that's the idea.

    I dunno, I think its going to either make all the games seem the same, or end up carrying over very little.

  3. Suprising that SL would go for it. by Jartan · · Score: 3, Insightful

    SL's whole business model relies on an artificial land scarcity system to basically heavily overcharge for independent server hosting costs. I'll be surprised if they truly open the system up to another system that lacks artificial land scarcity.