Over the next few months I will be working on a project I’m calling “Basil”.

Basil has grown out of my experiences with virtual worlds and games and thinking about how one could build a viewer to look into virtual worlds and, in particular, in a way that the virtual worlds could mix and combine.

OpenSimulator grew around the Second Life(r) architecture with a central world simulator and multiple viewers connected to same. OpenSimulator extended that model by allowing people to host their own virtual world spaces (“regions”) on their computers while connected to common services (account, asset, location, …).

That model has been further extended by the ‘hypergrid’ model which allows a session to teleport to loctions in other grids.

This has spawned a multiplicity of OpenSimulator based grids and virtual worldness has flourished.

But that is for just one type of grid. Others have sprung up and they each present their closed world with no way of hypergridding between. Continents have formed in the virtual world and there is no way of travelling between.

So, my question is: how could one build a virtual world viewer where an OpenSimulator avatar could stand next to a HighFidelity avatar?

I will describe my approach in future posts. Eventually, the GitHub project will go public.