canuckistan
Mod Team
Joined: 17 Jun 2003
Location: Training future GS competitors.....
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 Posted: Wed Aug 09, 2006 8:10 pm Post subject: Second Life.com |
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Sim City x 1000!
http://secondlife.com/
This thing really seems to be taking off.
Maybe I'll build something cool!
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/opinion/story/0,,1824034,00.html
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Slices of life in a parallel universe
Victor Keegan
Thursday July 20, 2006
The Guardian
On Sunday evening I was invited by a Guardian reader to a lecture, Life on Mars, hosted by the International Spaceflight Museum. I was delighted to accept but had difficulty finding the exact location. When I eventually arrived a bit late, I snuck in at the back and sat down on the far side of the auditorium. I listened to an animated discussion about space travel, its cost- effectiveness and whether we will all be forced to do it eventually as a result of destroying our own planet.
In case anyone hasn't twigged, this was happening in cyberspace thanks to the mindboggling power of Second Life, the three-dimensional online phenomenon (it is hardly a game) that is taking the web's potential to a new level. When you join at secondlife.com you choose a name and an atavar (a 3D representation of yourself) and you are ready to go. It costs nothing to join and explore until you want to build houses, buy an island for $1,200 (�656) or products from the shops that are springing up.
The BBC has staged a pop concert on a Second Life island, but this is only a tiny part of what is happening. At least 50 universities have bought space to build campuses to experiment with virtual worlds as a teaching tool. Architects, teachers, scientists and anthropologists are colonising it, as are real estate developers out for a quick buck. It has been used for community schemes to help sufferers from strokes and other conditions. Second Life sports its own money - Lindens, convertible into dollars - and even a red-light zone.
Recently, a (real world) conference at Harvard was simultaneously replicated in Second Life so that others could participate in a virtual conference hall. One way of looking at Second Life is that it is a virtual ecosystem capable of replicating almost anything in the real world that can be digitised, but without any shortage of resources. Last week, Davee Commerce (his Second Life name) from Britain's National Physical Laboratory, which has its own site on Second Life, guided me around an area devoted to space flight that displays space rockets from Russia and China, among others. He took me on an a trip to Mars complete with a simulation of the terrain of the planet.
How important is all this? It is possible that as post-industrialisation gathers force in the west's virtual economies, with unlimited scope for expansion, these will take up some of the unemployment in the real world. If you think this is far-fetched, there are already successful companies that exist only in Second Life, one of which employs 20 people to build structures for people who haven't the time to do it themselves. People who dismiss this as zombies looking at screens have to answer one simple question: What is more "real" - someone staring at a cinema or TV for two hours in silence, or people using a screen to cooperate around the world in an interactive way?
Cory Ondrejka, vice-president of product development at Linden Lab, which owns Second Life, claims it has 330,000 users and is growing at 12% a month without any marketing. The demographics are fascinating: the average age is 33, half of users are women and a very large number haven't played online games before. He also claims that 60% of users create their own content compared with less than 1% of readers of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. He admits that the accelerating success of Second Life surprised its creators but that hasn't stopped speculation about a billion-dollar company emerging within its space. I have been smitten by Second Life and was even preparing to give up my addiction to Flickr.com, the photo-sharing community, to make room for it. However, someone has just devised a way to import photos from Flickr to line the walls of the home you are building in Second Life. With all that is happening in the real world, there must be a temptation to climb into Second Life and just stay there.
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