The namesake for our company is a series of novels by Tad Williams: The Otherland tetralogy, consisting of four volumes telling a many-facetted story from a near future society. Most of the story takes place inside a number of virtual worlds, The Otherland Network, through which a group of protagonists has to travel in their fight against a malevolent and very powerful organization.
This set of virtual worlds has a lot of different “themes” or settings. Some of them are very realistic but set in different epochs of history, others reproduce the worlds of famous literary works. Another set of worlds is pure fantasy, in some cases even with different physical laws. Yet, all of these worlds are interconnected and the circle of friends traverses all of them with the same identities – their avatars looking different in different settings, though.
We firmly believe that this is a plausible model for the future Web 3D, the next evolutionary step of the world wide web. (See our vision) Actually, we think it is a much more plausible model than the assumption that the Web 3D will be a monolithic platform based on just one standard role model about how a virtual world on the internet should look and feel.
There will be standards governing how to interact with these worlds, standards for moving and navigating within and between them (while taking your identity and some of your possessions with you). There will certainly be standards for transferring (some) content between these environments.
But - like in Tad's novels - people will have a wide range of options for their virtual environment of choice, ranging from incredibly detailed replicas of the physical world to universes, which are only limited by the boundaries of our imagination.
The keywords are diversity, creativity and freedom (of choice).
