Howard Look gave the keynote speech at IEEE Virtual Reality last week. He talked about Linden Labs’ plans for the next few years of development. Apart from better user experience through better client viewer software, he talked about the back-end services and their plans for openning these services up. As noted elsewhere in this blog, the openning up of the client software meant that both new clients and replacement servers were built. However, up until now the official server has been a closed box (albeit one which you can buy in a 2U case for your corporate data center).
The key point about the services was the number of services proposed. Howard’s slides mentioned:
- Linden Dollars
- Map
- Chat
- Voice
- Media
- Search
- Scripting
- Events
- Physics
- Groups
- Identity
- Presence
- Inventory
- Classifieds
A second important point was that they were working with the IETF on some of them; some of the functionality competes with existing standards, so it’ll be interesting to see if Linden move to supporting such standards.