Building Interoperable 3D Virtual World Platforms with RESTful Web Services

3D virtual world technologies are growing very fast and provide opportunity for innovative services with disruptive user experience. However, the lacking of standards significantly hindered the interoperability among 3D virtual worlds. In this paper, we developed a light weight 3D virtual world service platform using RESTful Web Services. It covers most of the key services now provided by different 3D virtual world platforms. We also developed a reference implementation of plug-in for one of the popular 3D virtual worlds that could communicate between the platform independent layer with the specific 3D virtual world platform to realize the real 3D scenarios on that 3D platform to operate 3D virtual objects, avatars, zones, and robots. This approach not only could solve the hard problem of interoperability issue among different 3D virtual world platforms (with client-server model), but can also seamlessly integrate 3D virtual world with numerous Web applications.