Virtual Environment interoperability

There’s an article on MIT’s Technology Review that talks about the work being put into the effort to make all the various virtual world protocols transparent to users and their avatars. Jaron Lanier seems to think that it will come together, but that it will not be a non-proprietary solution.

What does an avatar or other virtual creature (potentially an artificial life organism) need to expose to various APIs to be “protocol transparent”? Sounds a lot like the work required to build an Alife SDK.