About the Meeting

This virtual meeting explored enterprise applications of virtual worlds—and in this case, specifically OpenSim-based VWs—and participants were given a tour of the innovative Shaspa initiative of Oliver Goh and his collaborators (including the Serious Game Institute at Coventry University).

This meeting used OpenSim. OpenSimulator is a 3-D Application Server. It can be used to create a 3-D virtual world (à la Second Life) and includes facilities for creating custom avatars, chatting with others in the environment, building 3-D content in world, and creating complex 3-D applications in world. OpenSimulator can also extend via loadable modules or Web-service interfaces to build more custom 3-D applications. OpenSimulator is released under a BSD License, making it both open source and commercially friendly to embed in products (see http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page).

All previous virtual meetings of Virtual Worlds @ Work (VWW) have taken place in Second Life, because it is the most well-known and used virtual world for business applications. But from time to time we try other, emerging virtual-world platforms, so we can test and experience how these platforms compare with Second Life.

In the past 6 to 12 months we have seen growing interest in OpenSim, in part because it is free and open source, thus giving organizations greater control and freedom (by having access to the source code) than in the case of Second Life.

Although much of the focus of VWW is on applications for learning and training and for collaborative work, we also like to explore other enterprise applications. This meeting gave us an opportunity to see what a Swiss entrepreneur and visionary is doing to test a range of applications on the OpenSim platform.