(disclaimer: I'm a Cofounder & CTO of Improbable - and massive fan of Second Life)
You're right to see that there are some inspirations from worlds like Second Life with our platform - it spatially distributed the simulation of the world through multiple servers.
Will elaborate on this in a blog post a some point, but some main differences:
-SL is a great example of a product somebody could make on top of SpatialOS: we're less of a 'social world environment', and more of an abstract spatial computation platform. We don't care what game engine is used, what the view of the world is, etc.
-While really impressive for its time, SL's architecture didn't re-distribute its load across machines based upon player & object density - each server was statically allocated a part of the world. This meant concurrent players per 'Sim' were limited to ~50. We can move these boundaries on the fly to deal with higher density. Here is an example (we really need a better one, this doesn't do it justice!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXhxI4dKU_E&t=1s
-Although a player could cross server boundaries, it was never very smooth, and people in SL would deliberately limit their playspaces to a single server. To create a proper seamless world you have to deal with multiple servers simulating the same physical space, and reconciling with each other. Here is an example of us doing this with Unity3D and physics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysB6bi7QUbw
I'm curious how SpatialOS compares to Second Life's successors -- Sansar and High Fidelity. I gather that they also allocate processing in a more targeted way, to respond to demand.
P.S. I'm also a huge fan of SL, and look forward to trying out whatever similar world emerges using SpatialOS.
