Second Life gets a direct competitor: Multiverse

August 3, 2007

Second Life (finally) gets a direct competitor: Multiverse «

The brainchild of several ex-Netscape execs, the Mountain View start-up Multiverse, as the name suggests, isn’t a single online world, but a platform for creating games and other 3D experiences with the company’s development tools, which are then run on its servers.

It will be interesting to see who wins out in this battle. My bet is that the first one to make it easy to develop for (current hedge goes to Second Life) will win out but I suspect that the Multiverse team has more than one trick up their sleeves. The winning system will combine:

• Ability to make your portion of the world accessible based on a multi layer authentication type of model.
• Ability to port things built in one simulation into another (and the same is true of avatars)
• Ability to self-host

Those systems will eventually become more like application servers hosted by the different owners and the winning company (whether it is Linden Lab or Multiverse) will run the equivalent of the domain name system to provide linkage.

Definitely a development worth keeping an eye on.

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