From Linden Lab:

Last month IBM and Linden Lab demonstrated inter grid teleports between the Second Life preview grid and an Opensim instance run by IBM. Torley Linden made a video of the event. Now we are making the intergrid teleport code available for all developers interested in making virtual worlds interoperate. Today we begin a public beta program for all prospective “gridnauts” (a gridnaut is anyone who has successfully teleported between virtual worlds).

This beta is intended for virtual world developers. The purpose is to establish a base level of interoperability — no inventory, textures, or attachments will transfer upon intergrid teleport. You will appear on the target grid’s simulator as that grid’s default avatar (Ruth). Second Life resident Tara5 Oh has a walkthrough of the Open Grid Beta Program.

From Ugotrade:

Open Grid Public Beta opened today (see Second Life blog) marking the beginning of a new era of interoperable virtual worlds and a new architecture for Second Life TM. The magic of “running code and consensus” is here and, at least between OpenSim and Second Life TM, avatars are jumping back and forth. Hamilton Linden, who is leading the Open Platform Product Group (OPPG) as Director, Engineering for Linden Lab said:

The Public Open Grid Beta is an important step towards opening up the Second Life Grid to become interoperable with other virtual worlds. Having successfully demonstrated interoperability with IBM, we’re excited to begin interoperability testing with the entire OpenSim community.

In the picture opening this post Adam Frisby (avatar Adam Zaius) one of the founders of OpenSim, David Levine, IBM, (avatar Zha Ewry) who wrote the interoperability code. and myself are about to teleport from the Ugotrade OGP (Open Grid protocol) enabled OpenSim to the Linden Lab Open Grid. The teleport to an external region option is in a pull down menu that brings up the box you see on the left. If you join the Beta and want to visit, my region URL is http://ugotrade.net:9000

As these teleports are about moving identity, at the moment, and no digital assets are moved we are all Ruths.

You must join Gridnauts in Second Life TM if you want to participate. The download and instructions for the OGP (Open Grid Protocol) Open Grid Viewer will be on the Wiki. And, to get a zipped binary package to set up an OGP enabled OpenSim you can go to the OpenSim forge site. Thanks to Mono and .NET using the same bytecode format, the same package will work just fine for .NET and Linux/Mono. Mike Ortman, DeepThink has generously created the zip package which he will keep updated.

The picture below shows how the Open Grid client which, in addition to the teleport option after login, allows you to select an external region even before you log in