[Paul Kunz, builder of the 1st US Website. Photo by Shel]
Sometime earlier today an avatar was successfully teleported from a SecondLife Virtual World preview Grid onto an OpenSim world developed by IBM, marking the first incident of virtual space travel by a virtual life form. While the folks at Linden Lab are emphasizing the limitations of what was accomplished, one cannot help but marvel at the implications of what it means.
In cyberspace, where humans create worlds and emulations of life forms, we are seeing the first steps of travel. How will this evolve? Will visiting avatars always be welcome? Will bands of avatars start invading worlds and exploiting the original inhabitants. Will some avatars enslave those of lesser technology developments. Will an avatar from one company slip in and spy on a competitor's virtual world at some point in the not-so-distant future.
One can only speculate or perhaps write a great scifi adventure.
I believe virtual life, like real life, has a way of going beyond what was originally intended and I have a sense that this small virtual steps may someday be looked back upon with the significance of that day in 1993, when Tim Berners-Lee sent a message to Paul Kunz at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Lab over something that he was calling, "The Worldwide Web." The content had to do with collaboration on a paper for an upcoming event. Paul built the first US website on his Trusty NeXT Computer and the world has taken the concept some distance.
So it may be with what IBM and Linden labs accomplished today.
