Virtual Worlds Get a Second Life with IBM

I was lucky enough to interview Irving Wladawsky-Berger for the Guardian shortly before he retired from IBM. One of the most intriguing hints of things to come concerned virtual worlds:

Does IBM have its own internal virtual world system - an intraworld running on its intranet?

We plan to build them; exactly how is all under discussion. We very much feel that many of our clients will want intraworlds in the same way they have intranets.

Then you want to make the navigation between the intraworlds and public worlds as seamless as possible.

Some of the "how" regarding interoperability is being addressed with this interesting collaboration between IBM and Linden Lab:

IBM and Linden Lab, creator of the virtual world Second Life (www.secondlife.com), today announced the intent to develop new technologies and methodologies based on open standards that will help advance the future of 3D virtual worlds.

...

IBM and Linden Lab plan to work together on issues concerning the integration of virtual worlds with the current Web; driving security-rich transactions of virtual goods and services; working with the industry to enable interoperability between various virtual worlds; and building more stability and high quality of service into virtual world platforms. These are expected to be key characteristics facing organizations which want to take advantage of virtual worlds for commerce, collaboration, education and other business applications.

What's striking about this announcement - still rather lacking in details, but clearly very good news for Linden Lab - is the emphasis on openness:

Open source development of interoperable formats and protocols. Open standards in this area are expected to allow virtual worlds to connect together so that users can cross from one world to another, just like they can go from one web page to another on the Internet today.

No surprise there, really - open standards are the only way to build resilient, heterogeneous systems. And if you're contemplating linking together myriad, disparate virtual worlds, it had better be resilient in the extreme. (Via Clickable Culture.)