> A virtual world is still based on fundamental spatial concepts like needing to travel, having benefit of proximity/association, and so on. Yup. Second Life h

> A virtual world is still based on fundamental spatial concepts like needing to travel, having benefit of proximity/association, and so on. Yup. Second Life heavily takes advantage of that, and sells virtual land. Which actually works, because it turns out there's such a thing as a desirable location even when it's completely artificial. For instance SL has "welcome areas" where new people show up, and depending on what you do, that may or not be a good thing. > That is before you get to business interests being first and foremost around succeeding with their own products, not interoperability with nonexistent or noncooperative competitors. The market has to hit a point where vendors agree that interoperability is important enough to accept the tradeoffs that come with it, before any technical effort there can succeed. IMO, interoperability in the space to a significant extent is near impossible. Yeah, on the surface we all can use JPG textures and figure out an avatar standard, but beyond that things quickly get complicated. Second Life has its own scripting language, and its own set of limited primitive object types (eg, cube, sphere) that can be created parametrically, and nothing else is compatible with that. The different internal architectures also get expressed in the way scripting works, so it just doesn't translate.