Is this the first step in unifying virtual worlds?

A couple of years ago, Linden Labs’ Second Life was all the rage, with thousands of dollars invested by companies such as Coca-Cola and Nike to develop an online presence. The virtual world didn’t exactly end up living up to its potential, but those companies who stuck it out (as well as players in Second Life) may soon be able to get more bang for their virtual buck. Linden Labs and IBM announced this week on the Second Life blog that they were able to teleport avatars from Second Life to a virtual world running on an OpenSim server using the Open Grid Protocol. They claim this is the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another.

OpenSim, a Virtual Worlds server which can be used for creating and deploying 3D environments, was started by a small team of developers. Using the Second Life client and libsl (an open source library used to create clients that could connect to Second Life), OpenSim’s goal is to provide a virtual world platform that any application could use as a framework. Simply put, think of it as a server-side Unreal Engine for virtual world developers.

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