So, Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life have announced that, in conjunction with IBM that they will work together to produce avatars that can move from one virtual world to another. A sort of "passport for virtual people" if you will.
There's more detail from Reuters if you want it, or there's lots of at talk Read/Write Web.
Both companies have done more for virtual worlds than most, but this seems to me to be fundamentally missing the point - or at least the potential - of this stuff. After all, I don't really want my avatar to move between a series of closed virtual environments: I want a single, linked virtual environment that I can move around freely.
Stick with me here - this seems to me to be an important difference that could determine the future of this sort of cyberspace. Compare it to the web: not place a limited by the imaginations or fiscal imperatives of its owners, but an open-ended system that runs unbounded. On the web my identity can change as much as I want, but wherever I go the underlying platform and protocols are the same.
Within the boundaries of the web, I can move, travel, read, investigate, play, talk and all those things. Websites and their contents change over time, and from place to place, but the underlying structure of the web itself - the hyperlink - stays the same.
With transferable avatars, however, it is my identity which remains constant and the worlds themselves which alter. The worlds are not linked together, so my avatar has to act as the hyperlink. Even if my avatar can switch seamlessly from Virtual World A to Virtual World B, those worlds may run by entirely different rules and different physics.
Maybe I'm missing something, but that's not the metaverse - it's a series of rooms that I've been allowed to walk through.
