Solipsis is an online 3D game-type world – not dissimilar to more well known virtual worlds such as Second Life, Eve Online or World of Warcraft.  Not dissimilar but also totally different…  Let me explain – they are similar in the sense that both Solipsis and the examples above are 3D worlds that users can inhabit – create an avatar to represent them, explore the world, have adventures, hook up with other players, build new structures within the world and so on.  But there the similarities end – for all other online worlds are centralised and owned whereas as Solipsis is not.  The other examples run from servers operated by the company that owns the world.  The software that runs the virtual worlds is owned by the companies and the terms and conditions under which the player can become a citizen of the virtual world is also set by the company that owns the world.

By contrast, Solipsis is a peer-to-peer world (using UDP as a protocol); rather than existing on a centralised server, it exists spread over all of the computers of all of the participants.  Why this way?  the developers respond; “Because servers are the bottleneck of every massively-shared applications, virtual worlds and online games. This bottleneck limits their scalability and bounds the freedom of the virtual world’s inhabitants. As many others, we believed that a decentralized system is the solution to deal with the increasing size of this kind of application.” This means rather than being a virtual world – it is a virtual meta-world.  Not only that but the source code that powers this meta-world is also open source.

This is a exciting idea – not the first attempt at an open multi-player environment (e.g. OSMP and Croquet), but I’d argue one of the most developed and most technically sophisticated – it also represents and interesting idea – that rather than having one world and one way to organise it – we have many metaworlds.  Plus, it looks amazing!