Fancy a new viewer?

It hasn't taken long for the open source community to rip the Second Life viewer to bits and learn how to modify or even delete the bits they don't want.

Nowhere is this more evident than the BDSM community. Marine Kelley's new viewer is a variant that works with scripts available for free from her shop, designed to compliment her existing range of, erm, toys. The viewer reacts to the scripts by removing items from the menus and pie menu that appear when you right click the avatar. It's aimed at "hardcore" BDSM players (though how you can be hardcore when it's your pixellated avatar that's getting the whipping, not you) who want that little bit more realism. Drop the script into a ballgag, and you can't speak through that ballgag on the open channel. Not 'can't speak by mistake', but viewer-enforced can't speak at all. Drop the script in a set of cuffs or other restraints, and the "detach from avatar" options all vanish. If you get locked in, you're locked in, and you can't get out from this viewer.

It's an interesting new development, certainly far from anything Phillip Rosendale ever dreamed, and I can see similar developments coming in the not too distant future. Just today the furry community was polling its membership about disabling scripting and building to anyone outside their group; the next logical development from that might be a viewer that has an identification string that an in-world item can ask for, and sends home anyone that doesn't have the FurLife Viewer. I can see it coming, and it wouldn't be too hard to do.

Of course, this makes a mockery of age verification, since viewers will be able to ignore parcel flags, which makes you wonder why Linden Labs are still talking to Integrity at all. More ominously groups might be able to use it to keep themselves underground and away from the prying eyes of law enforcement, but that's technology for you.

The pandora's box of Open Source Second Life has been opened. I wait with interest to see what it lets out!