The Future of Virtual Worlds is all ready to go ahead

Written by Pierre-Olivier Carles (25 March 2008)

OpenSimulator, a project well known as OpenSim, has just found significant and active support from RealXtend, a joint-venture between two Swedish 3D specialists.



If the video doesn’t make you see why it’s so important for Virtual Worlds’ future, then check out this Road Map.

Under testing for the next release (29th of February 2008)

* Free-form non-humanoid avatars * Global avatar mesh, skeleton, textures, attachments and animations * Single sign-on to multiple worlds for teleporting * Avatar generator * Avatar attachment tool to help set 3D meshes to different bones * Unlimited amount of attachments per bone * Teleports between realXtend and Secondlife * Avatar storage to move avatar appearance between realXtend grids/worlds * Mesh tool to scale and set pivot of 3d models * Server launcher and configuration application * Home automation example using X10 technology * Bot with Python scripting * Media library for world builders * Server status window

Roadmapped features

* Direct3D rendering for better performance * Support for OGG Vorbis * Support for video (other than quicktime) * Avatar generator and attachment tool integration to rexViewer * OGRE materials support * Procedural textures to reduce network load * On-the-fly compression for mesh up/downloading to reduce network load * Client side prediction * Improvements to in-world building tools * Avatar off-line mode, with scriptable behaviour * Texture projectors * Weather support * Integration with skype/google spreadsheets/openoffice * Inverse kinematics * Avatar face/head animation based on live video camera data * Lip synch for VOIP * Cloth physics * Vehicles’ support * Global rights management for objects in distributed architecture (you can set rights for objects as in SL) * Wallet and transactions

Clearly, OpenSim will accelarate its development before Summer 2008. It’s definitely another - huge - step towards interoperability.

At Stonfield InWorld, we are following this progress closely as well as carrying out our own work on this topic. Our main concerns are business uses such as e-Learning, e-Commerce or Collaborative Work…

Take a look at these two tutorials below…
The first one is about including a VNC screen directly in RealXtend and the second one shows how to import objects directly from Maya. Our team did that two weeks ago, on Stonfield’s RealXtend servers.



By the way, many thanks to the RealXtend Tech Team for their awesome work !

Guys, you rock ! ;-)

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Category: Open Source, R&D, Second Life (tm), Virtual Worlds, e-Commerce, e-Learning