Hyperlinks in virtual worlds

Hyperlinks are, at present, a novel feature in virtual world platforms, aside from hyperlinks in the in-built chat clients between users' avatars. In the latter 2000s, however, a number of architectures were created for various decentralized virtual world platforms in order to facilitate easier travel of avatars between two or more separately-hosted grids or servers.

Space-linking in OpenCobalt

Open Cobalt 3D hyperlinks connecting five different virtual spaces. Three-dimensional hyperlinks appear as navigable portals and enable Open Cobalt worlds to be organized by end-users into an interlinked network of virtual spaces across local and wide area networks.

Open Cobalt uses a method of hyperlinking, known as "space-linking",^[1] which resembles a window frame or portal and, when revolved, shows a 360-degree real-time view of one region to a user in another region; such portals can also be walked through by users. Space-linking is an alternative to teleportation, a more common means of traversing between regions or spaces, and is also a primary means of travelling between whole grids.

Like MediaWiki's redlinks, such portals are also used to link to uncreated spaces or regions (colored in black) in order to indicate the need to create newer spaces.^[2]

Hypergrid in OpenSim

OpenSimulator also uses an architecture known as "Hypergrid", which allows users to teleport between multiple OpenSim-based virtual worlds by providing a hyperlinked map which indexes public grids.^[3] This allows for public grids to retain teleportation links to each other without having to be on the same grid.

References

↑ "Teleporting and Space-Linking". OpenCobalt project.
↑ Creating, Saving, and Loading Spaces
↑ Hypergrid

External links

Hypermedia

Basics	Hypertext Hyperlink Hypertext fiction Hypervideo Adaptive hypermedia educational authoring Hyperlinks in virtual worlds

Resource identifiers	Uniform resource identifier Internationalized resource identifier Uniform resource name Uniform resource locator Extensible resource identifier Persistent uniform resource locator Semantic URL

Concepts	anchor text click path Domain name click here Copyright aspects of hyperlinking and framing deep linking Fat link Fragment identifier Hostname Hypertext Inline linking inbound link/backlink HTTP referer image map Internal link Internet bookmark linkback Link relation Link rot Object hyperlinking Path Screen hotspot Source tracking transclusion URI scheme URL normalization URL redirection Website Web page XML namespace

Technology	CURIE Hypertext Transfer Protocol XLink

See also	Digital poetry History of hypertext Interactive novel Interactive fiction Timeline of hypertext technology Copyright aspects of hyperlinking and framing World Wide Web Domain Application Protocol

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 6/26/2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.