Wayne Porter has an extended summary of research on Solipsis, a peer-to-peer virtual world platform developed out of France:

Solipsis is a free and open source system for a massively multi-participant shared virtual world. It was designed by Joaquin Keller and Gwendal Simon at France Telecom Research and Development Labs. Its goal is to provide the infrastructure for a “Metaverse-like” public virtual territory. Once again taking scalability into account it relies on a (P2P) peer-to-peer architecture sothat the virtual space has the potential to be populated by an “unlimited” number of participants.

Thanks Wayne. I wish I knew what even half the acronyms stood for.

Pictures tell more words for me and so courtesy of the Solipsis site here are a few:

The second one – does that mean it’s a virtual world viewable through a Web browser using a variety of client types? Sounds like Metaplace and thrilling to see.

Even better is the following entry from their site:

We will open our source code repository solipsis.gforge.inria.fr to everyone before April 2008. Please be patient and come and check this page soon for fresh updates. All our developments are placed under the GNU/GPL v2+ licence so you will be able to use, modify or even improve Solipsis as will.

I wonder if Linden’s mad rush to open up its servers over the coming quarters towards “multiple grids by 2009″ (see my previous post) is driven at all by the accompanying mad rush of developers in all corners to open source other options. I’ll make a call to the Virtual World’s Standards Consortium to check that all these worlds will be interoperable and that we’ll have access to portable avatars per IBM’s scheme, if I can only find the number.

Final notes:
- Oh, and if anyone can slice through the acronyms and tell me whether it will support interoperability with 3D modeling I’d love to know.
- Keep an eye on the Wikipedia entry for Solipsis. It sounds like it was written by the company’s PR folks. Now that Wayne has brought attention to this (yay attention!) expect the OpenSim and Linden folks to go over and make a few corrective adjustments to the entry.