Virtual Rendezvous

Virtual Rendezvous is the name of an on-going open software effort, and the virtual corporation supporting it, whose short name is Rendezvous.

History

"Virtual Rendezvous" was the name chosen by Charles L. Perkins in 1993 for a virtual corporation that focused on the social aspects of the emerging broadband networks of that era. A Web site [1] to chronicle its various efforts over the years was created that same year, at first for use by the NeXT-only WorldWideWeb, then by the Mosaic browser, and finally by Netscape and later browsers.

During the long odyssey that followed, through many partners and teams of volunteers, and through 3DO University for US West (phone company)'s cable network, Time Warner's Full Service Network, and beta-testing Continental Cablevision's 2nd consumer cable modem in the world; then creating holographic audio spaces for Video On Demand tests, 3D Virtual Reality, immersive user interfaces, and location-based entertainment; through early relationships with Netscape Communications, firstperson (the Sun Microsystems spin-off that created the Java (Sun) Java platform), Wildfire Communications [2], Tellme Networks [3], and others; through contributing ideas to Firefly (website), Abuzz [4], Alexa Internet, and Keen [5]; and finally, seeking a commercial arm for server support through various CEOs and business plans in 1995–2000, the company has re-invented itself numerous times to reach its ambitious goals.

More recently, efforts have focused on knitting together JXTA (and JXME [6]), Jini, the Eclipse (computing) and Modeling Framework [7], Project Looking Glass, OpenSimulator (Second Life), the Pando (application) (BitTorrent_(protocol)), the Water programming language, and the Ruby programming language with the growing web of service-oriented applications and high-level languages built on the Java ME platform as a reference implementation of the full-scale Virtual Rendezvous Service. These disparate efforts, via interlocking, loosely coupled open standards, will soon result in one universal, ubiquitous, real-time communication and collaboration meta-service (and 3D meta-world UI) available across all devices, fixed and portable, as its creators had originally intended.