GridSurfing -- The intergrid story

GridSurfing -- The intergrid  story

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Key Concepts:

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Universal Viewer. 

(Imprudence, but  more so)

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Guest mode entry.  

(Server Side.) No register.  No password.  Look, but don’t touch.

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User scenario:  

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The first step toward fast and easy. 

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Fast.  You have one viewer on your machine that works for all grids.  (The pattern is just like with web browser.) 

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Easy: Grids that want to be public offer a guest mode.  (Works like forums with read-only guest mode.)  User can enter as guest and explore.  If the universal viewer offers grid-independent text and voice chat, guest user can enter and chat with friends .

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Various levels of guest access are possible, depending on what each grid chooses to enable.  These can be selected to limit server load as needed. 

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Like web surfing 

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But we go to grids instead of web pages.   I have been trying that out with Imprudence:

Surfing the Grid with Imprudence

Grid Hopper!
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Universal viewer: status & overview

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Imprudence works reasonably well for a first try at the Universal Viewer.  It connected with no problem to all the grids I tried.  It runs Second Life reliably.    The direction for future improvement is given by experience with the browsers:

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Log off a grid without closing the viewer (Imprudence has a Logoff button that will probably do that later).

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Remember the grid address (done) and password (screen setup is there, but does not seem to work yet).

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Have more than one grid open at the same time (tabbed gridding).

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Maybe introduce grid-independent text and voice chat.

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Guest mode

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Like the system on many forums and blogs.  The pages are open to be viewed by anybody.  No registration.  No TOS.  Guests mode: look, but no touch. 

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Guest  mode,options: 

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No avatar, fixed view point, no zoom, roam.  This is already available as streaming video over the web.  No viewer needed.  Second Life in a browser.  Text chat included.  A specialized bot could provide a single video stream for this service.

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No avatar, fixed view point, zoom, roam available. 

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Noobie Avatar:  Like any other avatar, but cannot change appearance except by selecting another avatar.

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Text  and voice chat;  Existing methods can distribute text chat.  If the Universal Viewer offered grid-independent support for these services, they would put no load on the grid.  

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Don't stop, thinking about tomorrow