3D Content Transfer

Second Life Grid® is a platform developed by Linden Lab for creating contiguous and persistent virtual worlds, particularly the well-known Second Life® virtual world, where all three-dimensional content is created by its own users. Since the public release of the client application’s source code in January 2007, this allowed the platform’s communication protocols to be examined, motivating a group of programmers to develop the server application known as OpenSimulator, which lead to the creation of alternative, independent Second Life-“compatible” virtual worlds (accessible through the same client application). Since Second Life remains the core virtual world of this community of users, one way in which OpenSimulator has been used is as a low-cost prototyping environment for three-dimensional environments whose ultimate goal is deployment in the Second Life world. But since there is no interconnection between the Second Life and OpenSimulator virtual worlds, transfer mechanisms are required to copy content among them, some of which have been studied, developed and described in this book.