Rezzable leave Second Life

… and choose Opensim.

Rezzable, arguably one of the most creative companies in the Virtual Worlds community, famous for their macroscopic Greenies builds and ethereal, dream-like fantasy Sims, announced yesterday, that they will be moving away from SL in July 2009. They plan to reopen the Rezzable Grid in Opensim “for people to help us test/improve OpenSim as well as showcase things that work there“, so they say  in the same post

Obviously, this is both a big loss for the Second Life community and a clear signal to Opensim users. The last few weeks showed, that Opensim is becoming a useful and stable platform for Virtual Worlds development: The LSL reimplementation is nearly complete, Charles Krinke, one of the main Opensim developers has stated that Opensim reached 95% compatibility with Second Life, new methods to legally copy your SL content to Opensimulator based regions have sprung up, and the Hypergrid technology makes it easy to freely teleport between your home Grid and any other hosted regions.

While I wouldn’t say that Opensim is perfect in mimicking Second Life (or should be), I feel that both worlds have their own sets of features. But in contrast to the closed servers of Second Life, the possibilities for plugging into and interacting are much broader for Opensim. It’s easy to build a Web application that enables users to upload content (like a powerpoint slideshow, or a music playlist, or a 3D model of any object) via a web browser, transfer it into Inventory content, and make it pop-up in-world, for example.

On the other hand, transfering parts of that lovely “3D-chatroom” into other media domains is easy too, and is done in multiple ways already: With Sparkle IM there exists an iPhone application to log into any Opensim Grid and partake in the ongoing Chat, private and group IM, for example (without rendering the fancy objects, of course). Other existing bridges are the IRC gateway, and the Elgg social web platform, that simply displays your user profile, your friend list, IMs (…)  on a web platform.

These are just some examples of how Opensim is improving and processing into a universal communication platform, instead of just mimicking the collaborative 3D aspect it has been descending from. If you haven’t yet, I can heartly recommend you to fetch an account in your friendly Opensim Grid (for example our virtyou MainGrid), and start exploring this new worlds now. Btw, Opensim is having it’s second birthday on July 22nd, so you really should have overcome the Ruth stage by then! (We have a starter set of cool avatars and buildings available, just in case^^)

See you in one of these worlds!
Torrid