OpenJPEG in SecondLife

In Januay 2007, Linden Lab, developer of the Second Life (www.secondlife.com) virtual online world, has opened a big part opening up its software for the contributions of any interested programmer by releasing
open source versions of its client software for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

For the JPEG 2000 compression module, the OpenJPEG library developed and maintained at UCL has been chosen, mainly because of its robustness. Since then, many programmers linked to SL (Second Life) have been working hard to optimize the OpenJPEG library to increase its performances, in order to make it as efficient as the Kakadu JPEG 2000 library used in the proprietary version of SL. Other optimizations and features of OpenJPEG developed by the UCL and other partners are directly injected in the SL code. Hence, this collaboration really goes in both directions.

Another good example of these collaborations between research centers and SL is the Stereoscopic Module developed by the  (http://um3d.dc.umich.edu/) University of Michigan 3D Lab. Welcome to the stereoscopic version of Second Life!

I think everybody benefits from these collaborations, and from our point of view it's extremely valuable to have the millions of SL users potentially using our tools.