Wormholes of Communication: Interfacing Virtual Worlds and the Real World

Virtual worlds such as Second Life are closed environments that are purposely isolated from the real world and, in particular, from the data and information space provided by the World Wide Web. There is a rising need, however, tocommunicate and exchange data between virtual environments and the outside world, both for commercial applications andfor private convenience.Companies, for example, may want to display price lists, corporate news, and other changing information insideSecond Life, and thus need a method for continually transferring data from their web site into Second Life.In this paper we tackle the problems and difficulties of data exchange between virtual worlds and the real world. We compare different fundamental approaches of realizing communication channels and outline a general method fordesigning interfaces between virtual worlds and real-world data spaces.We discuss implementation issues and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a number of successful prototype implementations.