DR DOBBS ISLAND: Can a universal avatar be created to share among many 3D virtual worlds? Representatives from IBM and from Linden Lab addressed this topic today at Dr. Dobb’s GridTalk. A gathering of 97 residents filled the two adjacent sims to near capacity.

IBM and Linden Lab are working on standards to allow users to move their avatars between virtual worlds, as well as standards for sharing data between virtual worlds and the flat Internet. Together they are looking at ways to permit secure transactions for virtual worlds and services. The “universal avatar” is being explored that can operate on multiple virtual worlds. Improved platform stability is a priority.

Ginsu Linden (Ginsu Yoon in real life) is the Vice President of Business Affairs for Linden Lab. IBM was represented by Zha Ewry, member of the Research Division (David Levine in real life) and DrCP Cydrome, Vice President of Digital Convergence (Colin Parris in real life). Moderator Ziggy Figaro rapidly directed questions at the speakers.

Ginsu gave an overview of the interoperability between virtual worlds. “So we start with the basics: login. Something like Open ID is a fine solution  (http://openid.net/

). From there, you want to take some avatar characteristics across experiences. So we have to define a comprehensive list of characteristics and define a way for various services to decide which of those characteristics to include. After avatars, you’d probably want to focus on what we call inventory items. But because the various services are so different, you’d have to work out a way to define both the comprehensive set and a means of culling down the characteristics of that set.”

Ginsu added “But the basic use case would be: wouldn’t you like to make a shirt in SL and be able to sell it in another virtual world?” This should provide benefits for business stability. Investments in one virtual world could be maximized and spread across many worlds.

“IBM’s interests are focused on first getting interoperability started via simple point services, such as the avatar definition, and for the longer term moving toward Web-like standards,” Ewry said.

Although a unified client would make interoperability much easier to implement, most virtual worlds are closed source. However, this may change over time. “It’s fairly easy to imagine sharing identity and authentication before some of the spaces will share representations of land and objects,” Ewry commented.

What does IBM get out of establishing interoperability standards? “There is a significant capacity to transform enterprises using this technology, even so much as the Web did,” Cydrome said. “IBM sees itself as one of the leaders here in this effort. Given the many enterprise processes that can benefit from this innovative learning and collaborative capability, we see this as a new step for enterprises toward cost reduction, increased efficiency and optimization.”

LL hopes to expand the market by establishing a standard.