Alejandro@Oxford

In the NYT there is an article “Free the Avatars“, reporting that IBM and Linden Lab (creator Second Life) are announcing at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo at San Jose, California that they will

“develop open standards that will allow avatars to roam from one virtual community to the next. The goal is let a person create a digital alter-ego that can travel to many virtual worlds, keeping the same name, look and even digital currency.”

This is an interesting development (I talked about it before in this post), for, IMHO, the main obstacle for virtual world growth is the multiplication of closed worlds in each of which a person has to create from scratch his or her virtual self. This limits the interest and multiplies the effort of the person participating in these world. With one common standard, we could travel through different worlds like we do on the internet. It will be the “real-virtual self” that will grow with us, leaving aside the computer and putting more of ourselves in it/her/him or whatever…

UPDATE: It seems that is not only IBM and Linden Lab but also Google, Cisco, Intel, Sony, Microsoft, and Motorola, that are working on this open standard. Read more.