Mechanisms of three-dimensional content transfer between the OpenSimulator and the Second Life Grid~® platforms

摘要

Virtual worlds have been successfully employed as tools for educational, simulation and training use. The ability for users to easily create their own content with simple editing tools has made the Second Life Grid® platform, and its free open source equivalent, OpenSimulator, very popular. While the Second Life Grid offers more features, stability and a larger user base, cost considerations and some lack of control have led some projects to consider development/deployment exclusively on an OpenSimulator grid. This poses the problem of how to transfer to such a grid any content that was developed and refined in the Second Life Grid, since the company behind Second Life ®, Linden Lab, does not offer an archival/restore facility for user-generated content. In this article, we analyse some third-party tools that can partially backup and restore some content and describe a mechanism to automatically capture all content in a whole region of the Second Life Grid and save it to a commonly used file format (Open Archive) that is universally used on OpenSimulator grids, and report on a prototype we developed to implement it with reasonable results, but also some serious limitations, which are further discussed.