Deepwire's Blog

A while back in April I remember seeing Linden Lab’s announcement that they were developing a behind the firewall version of their popular virtual world.  This was after receiving feedback from businesses, educational institutions and even governments that all mentioned having such an option would let them really incorporate virtual worlds into their core work.  Without this, their only option has been to access the public world of Second Life, often prevented from within corporate networks who require complete control over their computer systems.  At this time the new product was in the alpha stage, with a selection of organisations testing an installation, with a limited closed beta test planned.

Now it seems after further development by the Enterprise Team, Linden Labs will be announcing general availability of the beta product, called ‘Nebraska’ on Wednesday 4th November.  It’s nice to see that Linden Labs have paid attention to what different potential user groups want from Second Life, and are in some ways catching up to the technology offered by other virtual worlds, including Reaction Grid.  Being able to have a privately hosted Second Life based virtual world certainly solves the main problem from an educational perspective, as there will not need to be an age restriction.  Educational institutions that run the world will have complete control, ensuring no mature content is present, so staff and students could access the same world.

While no detail is given on price, if it will be possible to transport avatars between Second Life and a ‘Nebraska’ set-up, or the scale of the world, it definitely looks promising, since Second Life is perhaps the most well known name in virtual worlds.  For more information, check the Metanomics site on November 4th from 11:00 PST/19:00 GMT for a live stream of a mixed-reality panel dicussing the ‘Nebraska’ solution.

As I’ve been talking about virtual worlds a lot recently, Second Life and alternatives, I thought it would be a good to briefly mention some of the Viewers used to access these worlds.  There are many available, with 3 of the more prominent options covered here.

Hippo is perhaps the most well known, recommended by both OpenSim and ReactionGrid, and is a fork of Linden Lab’s viewer, enhanced for OpenSim.  It can be used to access Second Life, with an easy to access Grids menu to let you choose an alternative, or enter details if the grid is not listed.  It still looks like the viewer from Linden Labs, with the same layout and menu options available, with the addition of the Grid and Hippo menus in the Preferences.

Another one often recommended is the Meerkat Viewer, again based on the original from Linden Labs.  With Meerkat, grid selection is easier still, using a drop down menu on the home screen, along with a Grid Manager to enter additional grid details if needed.  Again, its appearance is familiar, with the Preferences menu now including a Database and a Meerkat tab.  The Meerkat tab is quite in depth, having 8 more tabs of options to let you tweak your viewer to suit your needs.

Cool Viewer is less well known, unknown to many users I have spoken to about their choice of viewer.  It was however recommended to me by another Second Life user, and until recently was the one I used, before discovering the others.  It is available as a standalone viewer with the familiar looks, and in the most recent verion I used, as a patch for the official Linden viewer.  Along with the “Cool features”, this viewer is also adult compatible and  “Restrained Life”.

Each of these looks similar to the Linden Lab’s viewer, and offers it’s own added features and optimisations, so it is not really possible to say which is “best”.  Though I’m not doing an in depth performance review, I have done a few tests, configuring each viewer in exactly the same way, and visiting a selection of locations in ReactionGrid, to check the average FPS achieved.

Hippo and Meerkat both perform similarly, although I did find Meerkat to be unstable at times, something that had been mentioned to me by others who use it.  Cool Viewer performed well, but at each location I tested, was around 1.5 FPS below the other two viewers.  Of the three, I now use Hippo as my main viewer, as it performs better graphically than Cool Viewer, without the instabilities of Meerkat.  This doesn’t mean it is the best viewer, nor that you shouldn’t use Meerkat or any other viewer if you want to.  Another viewer has also recently come to my attention, the Imprudence Viewer (http://imprudenceviewer.org/), which I plan to test soon.

Hippo Viewer available: http://mjm-labs.com/viewer/
Meerkat Viewer available: http://meerkatviewer.org/
Cool Viewer available: http://my.opera.com/boylane/blog/
Imprudence Viewer available: http://imprudenceviewer.org/

Although my work recently has been in Second Life, I knew that it is not the only virtual world around; just perhaps the largest and better known.  Many other worlds use similar technology, such as OpenSim to create the world, and will look like Second Life when logged in.   This reduces the differences in user experience between worlds; users create their avatar in the same way, and use the same tools for content creation, including LSL (Linden Scripting Language) for coding.  I had already come across ReactionGrid, and made an avatar there, before discovering Microsoft’s plans to move their Virtual World Presence from Second Life to ReactionGrid.

ReactionGrid is more focussed on education than Second Life, allowing users to learn and collaborate in a family friendly environment, in a way that Second Life cannot provide.  As Second Life is an adult world, for users over the age of 18, it is not possible for educators to work alongside students who are under 18.   The separate TeenGrid, run by Linden Labs, is for teenagers aged 13 to 17; while it is possible for educators to gain access, this is not easy.  For users of Second Life who would still prefer a family friendly environment, maturity ratings are not often enforced, as there is no requirement too, so they may still experience content they do not wish to see.  Another issue stems from Second Life being run by Linden Labs, who maintain overall control of the world, including of sims, units of virtual land, that users may purchase.   If Linden Labs decides to perform maintenance on their servers, this may leave users unable to access their land.  It was frustrating experiences such as this when trying to hold business meetings that ReactionGrid was born out of in mid-2008.

It began as a single server running open-source software, including OpenSim and SQLite, to get it started quickly and offer more control than is possible in Second Life.  This was only capable of hosting a small world with no more than 6 avatars logged in at once, so a solution was needed to let ReactionGrid grow.  It was Microsoft technology that provided this, with Team ReactionGrid developing a way to enable Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to work with OpenSim, as before this was not possible, and increasing the number of servers used.   They even offered the developed code to the OpenSim community, to allow others to make use of Microsoft SQL Server, so that larger worlds can be created.

ReactionGrid continued to grow, thanks once more to developments from Microsoft, Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V technology and SQL Server 2008.  This virtualisation technology has allowed multiple virtual machines to be run on a single physical server, each with it’s own SQL database, reducing costs considerably.  ReactionGrid now has over 1000 customers occupying 120 sims, each supporting 15 concurrent users, and saw a 200% jump in sales of sim packages since moving to Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008.

Perhaps the biggest indication of this success is Microsoft’s announcement earlier this month that it plans to shut down Microsoft Island on Second Life on October 31st, 2009, and move to Reaction Grid.  This move will mean that Microsoft’s virtual world resence will exist in a virtual world that runs entirely on a Microsoft platform, and most likely give Microsoft more freedom within the world than they had in Second Life.  I’m sure with how limited Second Life can be, even a company such as Microsoft would have found Second Life too restrictive, or simply too expensive, for any gains received.  On October 31st, Microsoft are holding a farewell/welcome party on both Microsoft Island in Second Life, and on ReactionGrid, to celebrate the move, with the chance to win freebies during the event, including a full copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional!

The sun sets over Microsoft Island, almost for the last time.

More details of ReactionGrid can be found here and on their website, including instructions on accessing the world.  For those who use Second Life, it is possible to use your existing Second Life client, modifying the shortcut to connect to ReactionGrid (Instructions here).  If you use an alternative viewer, such as the Hippo Client or Cool Viewer then you will be able to connect to ReactionGrid by adding it to the grid list, or selecting it if the entry already exists. I definitely recommend you check out ReactionGrid, especially if you are looking at virtual worlds from an educational perspective, as for this purpose, it looks to be less restrictive than Second Life, and have far more potential, as it continues to grow!