You probably remember Google’s Lively. It was around for about a year and then Google shelved it. But did you know that they have been working on a browser-based 3D plugin for a while?
It’s called O3D and was posted here last April.
Now there are always things being worked on that never quite make it into day-to-day living, but today’s post on Chrome OS puts the virtual web-in-a-browser a bit closer to a reality.
What does this mean? Maybe websites will have virtual worlds within them?
Imagine amazon.com’s home page as a 3D store you can enter. Maybe go to an aisle of books on Second Life and see that other people are there and strike up a conversation about what books they like.
And what does this mean to things like Second Life? Who knows, there could be many outcomes.
Maybe Linden Lab stays closed off to the rest of the hypergridded world and turns into an AOL type debacle. Certainly with the new SL in a Box, the thought of them staying isolated seems to be the case.
Linden Lab is working on browser-based plugins, but how successful it will be is anyone’s guess.
OpenSim (like our latest venture into Reaction Grid) is built to hypergrid to many other grids. This certainly seems more like a model that all of us understand in regard to real business and the web as we know it today.
The iliveisl team is heavily vested in Second Life, both in money for sims and with our inventories. The money is one thing, and while a large investment, the issue of our inventories are the biggest obstacles for us entering open source grids built with OpenSim.
However, our desire to help business and eLearning has led us to our own OpenSim grid with Reaction Grid. The obstacle of leaving most of your inventory behind is simply outweighed by the possibilities of hypergridded OpenSim worlds.
The politics are much less, the focus sharper, the cost much less, the performance significantly better, and the options seem to be what we had hoped Second Life would have been.
We have three years in Second Life and fortunately all our skills are 100% transferable to an OpenSim grid.
Things change. Second Life has changed. Viable alternatives are appearing.
Google’s O3D may be one of those turning points like Flash was in 1999.
reposted from the iliveisl blog