You know that Shenlei and I are good friends in SL. What you may not know is that now we are good friends outside of SL. 🙂 In the atomic world, Shen is CEO of Fashion Research Institute, Inc. Shenlei has invested much effort into Opensim. This week she announced a major enhancement that will bring joy to residents of virtual worlds – the creation of the Message Bridge. The technical announcement can be found at Open Simulator Forge.
What exactly is the Message Bridge? It is a tool that enables someone in an opensim grid to chat with a resident of SL or another opensim grid. I’m lifting the following directly from Shen’s blog on this subject:
The Message Bridge is simple. One simple chatted command, and I’m connected to colleagues and friends in Second Life without breaking immersion in OpenSim. I can stay in touch, handle issues as they arise, and remain safely tucked away in our OpenSim doing real work. It’s a small advance in technology, but a huge social advance for people doing real work in OpenSim.
People who are working in OpenSim usually have roots in Second Life, and are likely to have business contacts and actual business in Second Life as well. It is a matter of business productivity and quality of the work environment that the two populations can communicate through messaging without breaking immersion. It’s not teleporting, it’s not asset sharing, but it is a critical component to supporting actual workers doing actual work in these virtual worlds. It lowers the barriers to doing business across worlds.
Kudos to Justincc, the lead developer on this project! Not only is Justincc wonderfully brilliant, he is a nice guy too. 🙂
So here is the proof folks: You can see Shenle in her opensim grid chatting with me working away in SL. Same chat, different worlds. Notice that while my chat box is the old familiar SL look, Shen’s chat identifies the grid for each user. 🙂 You gotta love it.
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