They’re getting to be like cockroaches: everywhere. Here’s another online world. From its own publicity:

“Solipsis is a pure peer-to-peer system for a massively shared virtual world. There are no central servers at all: it only relies on end-users’ machines.

Solipsis is a public virtual territory. The world is initially empty and only users will fill it by creating and running entities. No pre-existing cities, inhabitants nor scenario to respect…

Solipsis is open-source, so everybody can enhance the protocols and the algorithms. Moreover, the system architecture clearly separates the different tasks, so that peer-to-peer hackers as well as multimedia geeks can find a good place to have fun here!

Current versions of Solipsis give the opportunity to act as pionneers in a pre-cambrian world. You only have a 2D representation of the virtual world and some basic tools devoted to communications and interactions. But it just works, so, come on and enjoy !”

Some reflection on this is provided here:

“[…]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. “