OpenSim goes Hyper - The Hypergrid
December 20, 2008 2:04 am“Hyper” is what I usually call a person that’s suffering from the tricky combination of to much coffee, to much stress and not enough sleep. So, I kinda see why something could be called a ‘hypergrid’. It’s like second life but with more bass and more coffee. Right? No? Let’s try again: “a Hypergrid is a confederation of OpenSim systems that have enabled the Hypergrid facility. Each user has a home grid or standalone where their user profile, avatar appearance and inventory is stored. Users can travel from their home to a different grid or standalone via a hyperlink. When they arrive at the foreign grid, they carry with them the url of their home asset and inventory services.” Too long? Ok, one more time: “Hypergrid means ‘portable inventory’. No more having to leave your stuff behind.” I must say, with each definition change, I like it more.
Justin further writes: “The Hypergrid is a very promising architectural direction for OpenSim. It moves from a system of centralized services to one a user can seamlessly navigate between many different grids whilst sourcing their appearance and inventory from their own home services.”
As most things Virtual Worlds related, the Hypergrid is a concept still more than code ready for production use, but a promising concept none the less. More information at the OpenSim wiki. Besides all the technical limitations there’s one issue that stands out: What about DRM?
Scenario: User A has as home base Grid A. User B owns grid B. Now user B visits Grid A and buys SexToy A made by User A and set to no-transfer perms. Grids A & B are hyperlinked, so SexToy A gets transferred to Asset Server B. As User B owns Grid B he has the power to change perms on SexToy A to ‘full perm’. User B goes unto Grid C and has full perm powers over SexToy A which he starts selling cheaper than User A does on Grid A. Digital rights management fail? Probably.
So trust will become the most important issue on ‘the hypergrid’. Both User A & User C should have known better than linking their Grids with user B. Especially as User C runs a teen-oriented grid which he tries to keep SexToy-free. We might need a few more buttons on objects we allow for sale by when this becomes ‘common fashion’, don’t you think? Suggestions: ‘This may (not) be transferred on the hypergrid.’ ‘This is ‘all ages’ / ‘mature’. (And then hypergrid enabled sims could block incoming ‘mature’ items if they wished. But what if a Grid owner allows false flagging of ‘all ages’? Might be good virtual money in that business. Well, I then trust becomes important again.
Anyway, the above issues are probably ‘far ahead in the future’ and maybe the world has figured out DRM 2.0 by then. In the mean while, keep an eye on ‘the hypergrid’ to see how it evolves! More ‘pro&con’ and further thoughts at JustinCC’s blog.
6 Responses to “OpenSim goes Hyper - The Hypergrid”
This brings the earlier discussion on currencies and exchanges right back, too. It makes a lot of sense to have one single currency or payment method on a hypergrid, instead of lots of separate, low trust currencies.
See also:
http://sered-sl.blogspot.com/2008/11/nature-of-open-grid.html
I really should talk more to the OpenSim people and convince them to enable standard web standards, too. OpenSim itself should at least in itself be far more flexible than this beast of an LL infrastructure.
The trust issue is of course a very much discussed one and maybe the main reason why OGP will not do much (if at all) on this front for now. I also doubt though that it can be solved on a technical basis. It’s the same problem the music industry is facing and their only way out is to adapt their business models and eventually go down the legal route.
I once was sitting with a friend together an afternoon thinking about this topic in depth. The main problem for any restriction e.g. a creator can put onto the “transferability” of an object means that a potential buyer will never really know where this object can be taken. This IMHO is a big problem. We even thought about dynamic assignments of “good” sims but this of course makes things even worse for the buyer. What if the creator decides to allow it nowhere at some point? Of if the creator just leaves the world and the list is never updated?
So the only thing really seems to be to either allow it to leave the originating domain or go everywhere.
Besides that I think the main problem won’t be sim owners who are copying stuff (actually a lot of effort, you need to run a server, you need to get people on there, you are very traceable etc.) but patched clients. Using such a client seems far easier to me than setting up a sim just for the purpose of stealing objects.
But I think we will have quite some discussions and experiments in front of us before this is settled. I doubt that there will be _the_ perfect solution though.
I strongly believe that creations should retain who the creator is/was. I agree with you Tao. There are widespread technical issues with this. But, I believe that creators would to themselves better justice with reputation and exposure if they allowed their creations to leave the grids origin. This could lead to additional business based on its own merit. I also believe that creators would do well by having a central internet based location that their creations can be purchased. They can’t possible have a presence in every grid that comes out in the future. So, if they show their willing to embrace the Internet, then you’ve just contributed to the sucessful evolution of virtual worlds. If you stay in SL with your product and lets say today is used as a starting point. Then you only have exposure to sell to the total # of avg users in SL. That being said, thats like saying I’m happy with my business as it stand in this ’small town’, I don’t want to expand. Its all a choice, you can change this right now by re-thinking your perms on products so your customers do have a choice to take it with them via say “Second Inventory”. This is my view.
That’s basically my thinking, too. It’s a tradeoff between security and potential sales. The latter might come with more potential theft (because that’s not impossible in SL as well of course).
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