Many existing virtual world architectures are designed largely as walled gardens.  These systems both intentionally and unintentionally make it difficult for multiple entities to participate in the running and simulation of virtual worlds and take ownership of user data. We'll describe the architecture of Sirikata, a new BSD licensed platform for virtual worlds.  This architecture attempts to address issues of scalability and federation both within a single virtual world and interoperation and migration between multiple virtual worlds.  Sirikata aims to provide a set of libraries and protocols which realize this architecture, as well as fully featured sample implementations of services for hosting and deploying these worlds. We believe this architecture and Sirikata will be capable of supporting a wide variety of virtual worlds, from fast paced multiplayer games to social virtual worlds.

Speaker bios:

Ewen Cheslack-Postava is a PhD candidate in the Stanford Computer Science Department.  His research focuses on the challenges in building scalable, federated, and secure virtual world systems.  His current work is on efficient and scalable services for communication and spatial queries in virtual worlds.  In the past he dabbled in high quality, interactive rendering techniques, taking traditionally offline techniques and making them run in real-time.

Daniel Horn is a PhD candidate in the Stanford Graphics Lab. Daniel has had an interest in shared 3d experiences since starting his open source 3d space simulator Vega Strike in 1998.  Currently Daniel is developing an open source BSD licensed virtual world platform, Sirikata, at Stanford.  Sirikata is designed to scale and provide a standard for shared 3d experiences including telepresence, games and the next generation of 3d web applications.