Weblin Makes Next Step in Avatar Portability

The Virtual Worlds News reported yesterday that Weblin has launched Weblin Gate.

Weblin Gate will allow avatars to export themselves, albeit in a currently limited capacity, to the World Wide Web.

"Ultimately, there's another plan, another vision. What we try to do is to give everyone a Web avatar from every virtual world," said Weblin co-founder Heiner Wofl. "While we're doing this, we don't want to steal users. We want to offer a platform based on open protocols. Anyone can run a Weblin server or write a client and anyone can host the avatar for the users. All the virtual worlds could do the same thing."

"With Weblin we don't try to make a perfect avatar creation tool. We give our users means to create their own avatars on the Web. There are other systems which are much better than our own, like Second Life," he explained. "Linden produced a really great avatar creation tool and we can regard Second Life as a very sophisticated avatar creator for Weblin. We'd be happy to cooperate with virtual worlds like this. We get more traffic and users. On the other hand, people create and customize their avatars in Second Life. They participate in the Second Life economy. And they participate on the Web with weblin. We don't steal users from Second Life, and we give them new tools."

"The next step could be that Linden Lab hosts their Web avatars for their users and create them on demand when they're accessed," he said. "It would take coding on their side and of course there's always much to do in startups, but the way we're integrating avatars on the Web, it's so simple that in just two weeks a good programmer could provide it. Compared to the coding they do in the server platform and networking, it's only 2-4 weeks of a good programmer, but it's management."