http://quizzicalcharms.blogspot.com/2007/04/bonus-mission-2-second-life-semi.html
Developed by Linden Lab, Second Life is the latest craze that is making waves amongst netizens. Armed with the tagline,” Your World. Your Imagination”, Second Life is an Internet-based virtual world built entirely by its users, called "Residents", it allows them to interact with each other through personalized avatars. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another. (“Second Life”, 2007)Just Another Game?Many call it a game but there are no losers or winners in Second life, it does not involve collecting gold rings and nuggets to add points and moving on to the next level or shooting aliens and weird creatures that comes your path, but yet it is highly entertaining and addictive like most best selling games. “Second Life is beyond a game,” says Foxy Xevious, a Second Life Resident, “it is a tool for artistic freedom that brings people together.” Indeed, you get to meet resident from all walks of life, you get to discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. There is also a high level of interaction going on in there, as you get to socialise and join in these activities. Similar to the idea of living in a fantasy world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), what sets Second Life apart is that “Second Life is intended to be a canvas, rather than a world that constrains residents to a specific theme or style,” says Linden Lab vice-president of product development, Cory Ondrejka. (Cook, 2007)Paint My World, Paint My LifeSecond Life residents build anything they want; they own it and can share it with other residents any way they want. Giving players ownership of whatever they create — from digital vehicles to “skins” that characters can wear to change their appearance— is a critical way “to truly maximize growth and innovation,” according to Ondrejka.(Cook, 2007) Second Life is all about personal expression and your avatar is the most personal expression of all. After all, an avatar is what represents you are the virtual world. It is very simple to personalize your avatar and it allows you to change anything you like, from hairstyles to the color of your eyes, and at point of time. Second Life is a world of no boundaries; you get to explore beautiful landscapes and even an underwater kingdom! It is also all about experiencing things that you will never get in real life. In Second Life, you could dine at the fanciest restaurants or dance the night away in the trendiest clubs and hang out with the coolest people in town. Being a resident in Second Life is more than just being part of a virtual community, it is literally being a citizen of a virtual world. The beauty of the virtual world is that it is a combination of the real world and the fictional world, and residents have the all access pass to experience them.Life of the Rich and the FamousOndrejka says that Second Life is simply drawn from the real world, pointing out: “Economic and market forces work in digital worlds in the same way that they have always worked, from ancient Athens to the modern world.” Second Life has its own fully integrated economy and a currency referred to as Linden Dollars (L$). As residents create new goods and services, they also buy and sell them in the Second Life. Second Life's real estate market provides opportunities for Residents to establish their own communities and business locations. Towards the end of 2006, Anshe Chung, the avatar or Ailin Greaf, has become the first online personality to achieve a net worth exceeding one million US dollars from profits entirely earned inside a virtual world. Named as the "Rockefeller of Second Life" by a CNN journalist, she has built an online business that engages in development, brokerage, and arbitrage of virtual land, items and was recently featured on the cover of Business Week Magazine.(“Anshe Chung”, 2007)ConclusionSecond Life is not a game, it is a place you can go and be whoever you want and do what ever you want. That is where the future of the Net is heading to. So if the real world is getting you down, you can always turn to Second Life and lead a semi charmed kind of life. References:1. Cook, B.(2007) Second Life: Build Anything, Be Anyone, Set Your Own Agenda. Apple Hot News. Retrieved on 6 April, 2007 from http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2005/07/secondlife/2. Second Life. (2007,). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved on 6 April, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Second_Life&oldid=1206965733. Linden Research, Inc. (2007) What is Second Life? Retrieved on 7 April, 2007 from http://secondlife.com/whatis/4. Anshe Chung. (2007). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved on 7 April, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anshe_Chung&oldid=120060081
Friday, December 21, 2007
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Second Life: Fears of a parallel life
http://www.lowfatbrains.com/tag/marshall-mcluhan/
I had an interesting conversation on the weekend with some friends, talking about Second Life, what it was, what it meant and so on. I held the view that Second Life fulfilled the requirements of being a type of drug, maybe even an hallucinogen, a highly addictive virtual substance that affected your senses and altered perception and reality. Having become addicted to old-school MUD’s in the mid-1990’s, I generally avoid online gaming as my addictive personality tends to not know when to quit, except perhaps too late (failing university was one consequence). So, when I hear of people dying from playing online games too much, or committing suicide, this strengthens my overall view that these things should be treated with extreme caution.
But something my one friend mentioned got me thinking. He asked, paraphrasing: “What’s the difference between what you do in Second Life, and what you do on, say, eBay? Or Amazon? Or any other internet activity?” And that’s, strictly speaking, true. A quick look at Second Life’s homepage shows 1.4 million users, and just over half a million dollars (US) spent in the last 24 hours (as of 16:51 GMT). But that’s not all. People have real-world business conferences in Second Life’s virtual setting, there’s traditional advertising and marketing and a virtual world representation of real world stores, musicians perform concerts, people buy, sell and rent virtual land, run businesses, and have legal disputes. People even play games within Second Life, as well as have traditional developers and coders within the game itself. There’s even porn.
What does it all mean? Is it just a game as many characterise it? Is it an OS or application platform as some people have suggested? Perhaps they’re both right. Myself, I view it as simply providing spatial references to the concept of “cyberspace”. (Perhaps we can call it “cybatial” if we want to get geeky). In Roger Clarke’s excellent work, Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-lost, he points out that “various experiences of using the Internet have” a “common” them, namely that “participants indulge in a ’shared hallucination’ that there is a virtual place or space within which they are interacting”. This is, incidently, where I thought that Second Life was a hallucinogen, but obviously the idea of Second Life being a drug applies to the internet as a whole.
The real significance of Second Life is that it has carried out what McLuhan termed the narcissus effect, named after the mythical story of Narcissus who saw his reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it, eventually dying as he was unable to tear himself from gazing at the reflection. As he says in Understanding Media, “in the true Narcissus style, one is hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form”. What Second Life has accomplished is to amputate the physical bodies of its participants. You’re no longer just going to a webpage from your browser, you’re walking to a store or flying to a conference on an island.
What Second Life demonstrates is what the Internet of Things may well look like. Second Life 2.0 (as in the unknown future incarnation of Second Life or an equivalent) will be not just about amputating ourselves, but also our real-world objects once they are embedded with RFID, as well as places and locations. A virtual-world representation of the physical world is not too hard to imagine where you’re able to walk around your own home, invite guests over and have them interact with whatever you have in your house all within the confines of your computer. Got a new widescreen plasma? You buy it from the store, log online, and you can show it off to your virtual neighbours. Perhaps you could pop on some VR goggles and really walk around looking at a 3D representation of your home, design a few objects in Second Life, and have a fabber create them for you, all while a friend from Australia sits on your couch talking to you. Hey, nice Plasma.
As Cypher says in The Matrix, “It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going byebye”.
I even suspect that real world geospatial data will be transplanted into “cyberspace”, meaning you could have a situation where you could physically interact with the real world - walking down the street, for example - but actually be viewing yourself in the game. Imagine: being able to live in a game, forever, that exists parallel to the real world. It’s not hard to conceive, because it does seem to be happening, slowly but surely, and Second Life is simply another sign of this, a reflection in the pool, not just of ourselves, but increasingly of our world.
I had an interesting conversation on the weekend with some friends, talking about Second Life, what it was, what it meant and so on. I held the view that Second Life fulfilled the requirements of being a type of drug, maybe even an hallucinogen, a highly addictive virtual substance that affected your senses and altered perception and reality. Having become addicted to old-school MUD’s in the mid-1990’s, I generally avoid online gaming as my addictive personality tends to not know when to quit, except perhaps too late (failing university was one consequence). So, when I hear of people dying from playing online games too much, or committing suicide, this strengthens my overall view that these things should be treated with extreme caution.
But something my one friend mentioned got me thinking. He asked, paraphrasing: “What’s the difference between what you do in Second Life, and what you do on, say, eBay? Or Amazon? Or any other internet activity?” And that’s, strictly speaking, true. A quick look at Second Life’s homepage shows 1.4 million users, and just over half a million dollars (US) spent in the last 24 hours (as of 16:51 GMT). But that’s not all. People have real-world business conferences in Second Life’s virtual setting, there’s traditional advertising and marketing and a virtual world representation of real world stores, musicians perform concerts, people buy, sell and rent virtual land, run businesses, and have legal disputes. People even play games within Second Life, as well as have traditional developers and coders within the game itself. There’s even porn.
What does it all mean? Is it just a game as many characterise it? Is it an OS or application platform as some people have suggested? Perhaps they’re both right. Myself, I view it as simply providing spatial references to the concept of “cyberspace”. (Perhaps we can call it “cybatial” if we want to get geeky). In Roger Clarke’s excellent work, Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-lost, he points out that “various experiences of using the Internet have” a “common” them, namely that “participants indulge in a ’shared hallucination’ that there is a virtual place or space within which they are interacting”. This is, incidently, where I thought that Second Life was a hallucinogen, but obviously the idea of Second Life being a drug applies to the internet as a whole.
The real significance of Second Life is that it has carried out what McLuhan termed the narcissus effect, named after the mythical story of Narcissus who saw his reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it, eventually dying as he was unable to tear himself from gazing at the reflection. As he says in Understanding Media, “in the true Narcissus style, one is hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form”. What Second Life has accomplished is to amputate the physical bodies of its participants. You’re no longer just going to a webpage from your browser, you’re walking to a store or flying to a conference on an island.
What Second Life demonstrates is what the Internet of Things may well look like. Second Life 2.0 (as in the unknown future incarnation of Second Life or an equivalent) will be not just about amputating ourselves, but also our real-world objects once they are embedded with RFID, as well as places and locations. A virtual-world representation of the physical world is not too hard to imagine where you’re able to walk around your own home, invite guests over and have them interact with whatever you have in your house all within the confines of your computer. Got a new widescreen plasma? You buy it from the store, log online, and you can show it off to your virtual neighbours. Perhaps you could pop on some VR goggles and really walk around looking at a 3D representation of your home, design a few objects in Second Life, and have a fabber create them for you, all while a friend from Australia sits on your couch talking to you. Hey, nice Plasma.
As Cypher says in The Matrix, “It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going byebye”.
I even suspect that real world geospatial data will be transplanted into “cyberspace”, meaning you could have a situation where you could physically interact with the real world - walking down the street, for example - but actually be viewing yourself in the game. Imagine: being able to live in a game, forever, that exists parallel to the real world. It’s not hard to conceive, because it does seem to be happening, slowly but surely, and Second Life is simply another sign of this, a reflection in the pool, not just of ourselves, but increasingly of our world.
Friday, November 23, 2007
Users Spend More Time on Second Life Entertainment Than Real Life
http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2007/07/users-spend-mor.html
Users spend 80 percent of their time in Second Life on entertainment activities, totaling just over 16 hours per week, reports Market Truths in their new study, Second Life Entertainment Market. Summarizing the report, the Business Communicators of Second Life blog says that's more than users report spending on entertainment in real life as "the median time spent on other forms of computer-related entertainment is just 4 hours per week, and 10 hours per week for non computer-related entertainment." What is possibly more interesting for brands entering Second Life is the breakdown of how users are spending that entertainment time.
Shopping tops the list, but as the LA Times pointed out, "shopping, at least for real-world products, isn't a main activity." Selling real-world products may not engage users, but the study lists plenty of other ways that users want to spend those 16 hours a week. Within the top of the list are plenty that would be easy experiences for real-world brands to provide and that it seems like many successful sites do:
1. Shopping
2.Traveling
3. Dancing
4. Talking with known acquaintances
5. Talking to new people
6. Listening to DJs
7. Building
8. Walking/hiking
9. Attending parties
10. Swimming.
Users spend 80 percent of their time in Second Life on entertainment activities, totaling just over 16 hours per week, reports Market Truths in their new study, Second Life Entertainment Market. Summarizing the report, the Business Communicators of Second Life blog says that's more than users report spending on entertainment in real life as "the median time spent on other forms of computer-related entertainment is just 4 hours per week, and 10 hours per week for non computer-related entertainment." What is possibly more interesting for brands entering Second Life is the breakdown of how users are spending that entertainment time.
Shopping tops the list, but as the LA Times pointed out, "shopping, at least for real-world products, isn't a main activity." Selling real-world products may not engage users, but the study lists plenty of other ways that users want to spend those 16 hours a week. Within the top of the list are plenty that would be easy experiences for real-world brands to provide and that it seems like many successful sites do:
1. Shopping
2.Traveling
3. Dancing
4. Talking with known acquaintances
5. Talking to new people
6. Listening to DJs
7. Building
8. Walking/hiking
9. Attending parties
10. Swimming.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Literature Review themes ideas
Looking out for themes about
-Where it came from and where its going? The transgression from board game to MMO
-Identity and role-playing
-Self Reflection
-Addiction
-Stereotypes of users
-Media coverage
-'Real' vs. Reality
-Why one would choose a second life rather than a first life?
-How technology affects us? The seduction of technology...
-The ideal virtual environment
-Should we embrace or be suspicous of the evergowing cyber culture
-Where it came from and where its going? The transgression from board game to MMO
-Identity and role-playing
-Self Reflection
-Addiction
-Stereotypes of users
-Media coverage
-'Real' vs. Reality
-Why one would choose a second life rather than a first life?
-How technology affects us? The seduction of technology...
-The ideal virtual environment
-Should we embrace or be suspicous of the evergowing cyber culture
7 Reasons Why Second Life Should Matter For Buisnesses?...
http://gigaom.com/2007/09/26/7-reasons-why-second-life-should-matter-for-biz-executives/
Written by Wagner James Au Wednesday, September 26, 2007 at 10:42 PM PT
Here’s some recent Second Life-related news items:
• A development studio based on an SL avatar secured venture funding from a NYC financier.
• A consortium of U.S. government agencies (including the Navy and Air Force) announced plans to develop a substantial presence in SL.
• An international coalition of labor unions is preparing to strike on behalf of Italian IBM workers at the company’s massive SL campus today.
If you’re a successful tech professional with zero personal interest in online worlds, those blurbs probably just provoked a bemused shrug. Even after reading constant rumors that Google (GOOG) itself is creating a competitor to Linden Lab’s user-created MMO, you’re probably still wondering, “But why should Second Life matter to me?”
In full disclosure, I’m writing a book on the subject, so I have a vested interest in replying. And while I’ve already written a lot about Second Life here, Om asked me to back up, and start from the beginning.
So, the brief answer: In a rapidly growing market of online world users, it’s the most successful example of an embodied, dynamically collaborative content creation platform that’s personally and economically transformative, and scalable to the entire world.
That’s a mouthful, so to break it down into individual parts:
1 - Rapidly growing market: By one reasonable estimate, 80 percent of active Internet users will participate in an online world by 2011, a trend largely driven by the young, who define and shape future Net usage. (A separate study forecasts 53% of all kids on the Internet will be in an MMO by that year.)
2 - Most successful: Currently with some 550,000 monthly active users, SL has grown rapidly and with general consistency since 2004 (12 months ago, it only had about 150,000 avid residents.) Yes, other MMOs are larger, but none of them are user-created, a crucial distinction I’ll get to later.
3 - Embodied: A 3D space navigated by user-controlled avatars that are convincing enough to make their owners feel a personal and social investment in the simulated world they’re in. MMO players refer to their avatars as “me”; several studies suggest this perceptual leap is a real phenomenon. When controlling a Second Life avatar, we even unconsciously obey our unwritten rules of eye contact and personal space.
But what’s so special about feeling like you’re in a 3D world? The better question is: what’s so special about words, numbers, and flat imagery? Those are relatively new tools, artificially imposed on a human evolutionary cycle of a couple million years. When we remember the past, plan the future — when we dream — we do so in the three dimensions displayed by our mind’s eye. Communicating information in simulated 3D seems to enhance learning and insight for that very reason: a common sense intuition that some studies seem to reinforce. Of course, other successful MMOs convey this embodied effect, but largely through content created and controlled by the world’s holding company. Which brings us to the next feature:
4 - Dynamically collaborative content creation platform: A medium where online multi-user content creation is updated in real time. SL is often called “a 3D wiki” — an apt analogy. Consider Wikipedia: At first, most entries in the amateur-driven encyclopedia were mediocre; through a networking effect, however, it quickly became an indispensable resource for every type of information. Second Life is Wikipediafying the universe in 3D, not just the real one, but fictional and even conceptual realities, including abstract art and mathematical theorems. Like Wikipedia, Second Life content skews heavily toward Internet culture in all its lovably geeky strangeness. But dismissing it on those grounds is like dismissing Wikipedia because most of its users (as this search ranking shows) are primarily interested in sci-fi/fantasy/videogames, celebrities, and sex.
5- Economically transformative: SL’s virtual currency (which can be bought and sold for US$) and intellectual property rights to user-created content (which are retained by their creator, even in non-SL projects) are transferable in and out of the global economy. In practical application, this has resulted in movie-makers, fashion companies, and even architecture firms using SL as a prototyping platform for their real-world businesses. The depth and variety of projects that have made the leap from online world to the real world market is unprecedented in other MMOs — or, arguably, in any other web 2.0 platform.
6 – Personally transformative: The striking thing is just who is doing this work, even making a living at it. Often they’re business-savvy homemakers, talented bohemians, physically or mentally impaired people, retirees, tech workers in developing nations, and people who’ve been otherwise kept out of the mainstream job market through real-world barriers that become irrelevant in Second Life. And this is what’s meant by personally transformative: a technology that improves people’s lives in a substantial, profound way. On the macro level, this leverages dormant human capital into the larger economy. eBay (EBAY) is revolutionary because it converted thousands of people into garage-based entrepreneurs and channeled enormous wealth back into the market. Second Life is an eBay of the imagination. (And unsurprisingly, eBay’s founder was an early Linden Lab investor.)
7 - Scalable to the entire world: Last January, Linden open-sourced its client code, and from this flowered a variety of alternate access portals into SL, including Wii controllers, cell phones, and thanks to a 15-year-old female hacker, the web itself. This makes SL a lead contender to become a universally accessible mirror world, where all our physical data is modeled in a dynamic network, an inconceivably valuable resource for scientists, governments, corporations, and beyond. Linden’s stated intentions to open-source their servers would make this outcome even more probable, while transforming the Net itself into a 3D medium.
That’s just the beginning. Many futurists envision a time when 3D printers will supplant or enhance much of our traditional modes of production. Impressive trial runs are already being conducted in Second Life, exporting avatars and other content into the real world — early glimpses, perhaps, of a time when most of our real world goods are developed and produced in the metaverse.
Does the above mean SL itself is an all-bets-on phenomenon? No, because it’s still staggering under scaling difficulties and poor retention rates, while a slew of competitors — Metaplace, Multiverse, HiPiHi, whatever Google’s cooking up, and near a dozen more — are attempting to outgun Linden Lab on their own terms. They’re creating new MMO platforms that’ll also feature avatar-based content creation where users own their IP, and some will probably do it better than Linden is right now. The ferocity of this competition proves one thing: from the market’s perspective, what Second Life originally unleashed is simply not going away.
Written by Wagner James Au Wednesday, September 26, 2007 at 10:42 PM PT
Here’s some recent Second Life-related news items:
• A development studio based on an SL avatar secured venture funding from a NYC financier.
• A consortium of U.S. government agencies (including the Navy and Air Force) announced plans to develop a substantial presence in SL.
• An international coalition of labor unions is preparing to strike on behalf of Italian IBM workers at the company’s massive SL campus today.
If you’re a successful tech professional with zero personal interest in online worlds, those blurbs probably just provoked a bemused shrug. Even after reading constant rumors that Google (GOOG) itself is creating a competitor to Linden Lab’s user-created MMO, you’re probably still wondering, “But why should Second Life matter to me?”
In full disclosure, I’m writing a book on the subject, so I have a vested interest in replying. And while I’ve already written a lot about Second Life here, Om asked me to back up, and start from the beginning.
So, the brief answer: In a rapidly growing market of online world users, it’s the most successful example of an embodied, dynamically collaborative content creation platform that’s personally and economically transformative, and scalable to the entire world.
That’s a mouthful, so to break it down into individual parts:
1 - Rapidly growing market: By one reasonable estimate, 80 percent of active Internet users will participate in an online world by 2011, a trend largely driven by the young, who define and shape future Net usage. (A separate study forecasts 53% of all kids on the Internet will be in an MMO by that year.)
2 - Most successful: Currently with some 550,000 monthly active users, SL has grown rapidly and with general consistency since 2004 (12 months ago, it only had about 150,000 avid residents.) Yes, other MMOs are larger, but none of them are user-created, a crucial distinction I’ll get to later.
3 - Embodied: A 3D space navigated by user-controlled avatars that are convincing enough to make their owners feel a personal and social investment in the simulated world they’re in. MMO players refer to their avatars as “me”; several studies suggest this perceptual leap is a real phenomenon. When controlling a Second Life avatar, we even unconsciously obey our unwritten rules of eye contact and personal space.
But what’s so special about feeling like you’re in a 3D world? The better question is: what’s so special about words, numbers, and flat imagery? Those are relatively new tools, artificially imposed on a human evolutionary cycle of a couple million years. When we remember the past, plan the future — when we dream — we do so in the three dimensions displayed by our mind’s eye. Communicating information in simulated 3D seems to enhance learning and insight for that very reason: a common sense intuition that some studies seem to reinforce. Of course, other successful MMOs convey this embodied effect, but largely through content created and controlled by the world’s holding company. Which brings us to the next feature:
4 - Dynamically collaborative content creation platform: A medium where online multi-user content creation is updated in real time. SL is often called “a 3D wiki” — an apt analogy. Consider Wikipedia: At first, most entries in the amateur-driven encyclopedia were mediocre; through a networking effect, however, it quickly became an indispensable resource for every type of information. Second Life is Wikipediafying the universe in 3D, not just the real one, but fictional and even conceptual realities, including abstract art and mathematical theorems. Like Wikipedia, Second Life content skews heavily toward Internet culture in all its lovably geeky strangeness. But dismissing it on those grounds is like dismissing Wikipedia because most of its users (as this search ranking shows) are primarily interested in sci-fi/fantasy/videogames, celebrities, and sex.
5- Economically transformative: SL’s virtual currency (which can be bought and sold for US$) and intellectual property rights to user-created content (which are retained by their creator, even in non-SL projects) are transferable in and out of the global economy. In practical application, this has resulted in movie-makers, fashion companies, and even architecture firms using SL as a prototyping platform for their real-world businesses. The depth and variety of projects that have made the leap from online world to the real world market is unprecedented in other MMOs — or, arguably, in any other web 2.0 platform.
6 – Personally transformative: The striking thing is just who is doing this work, even making a living at it. Often they’re business-savvy homemakers, talented bohemians, physically or mentally impaired people, retirees, tech workers in developing nations, and people who’ve been otherwise kept out of the mainstream job market through real-world barriers that become irrelevant in Second Life. And this is what’s meant by personally transformative: a technology that improves people’s lives in a substantial, profound way. On the macro level, this leverages dormant human capital into the larger economy. eBay (EBAY) is revolutionary because it converted thousands of people into garage-based entrepreneurs and channeled enormous wealth back into the market. Second Life is an eBay of the imagination. (And unsurprisingly, eBay’s founder was an early Linden Lab investor.)
7 - Scalable to the entire world: Last January, Linden open-sourced its client code, and from this flowered a variety of alternate access portals into SL, including Wii controllers, cell phones, and thanks to a 15-year-old female hacker, the web itself. This makes SL a lead contender to become a universally accessible mirror world, where all our physical data is modeled in a dynamic network, an inconceivably valuable resource for scientists, governments, corporations, and beyond. Linden’s stated intentions to open-source their servers would make this outcome even more probable, while transforming the Net itself into a 3D medium.
That’s just the beginning. Many futurists envision a time when 3D printers will supplant or enhance much of our traditional modes of production. Impressive trial runs are already being conducted in Second Life, exporting avatars and other content into the real world — early glimpses, perhaps, of a time when most of our real world goods are developed and produced in the metaverse.
Does the above mean SL itself is an all-bets-on phenomenon? No, because it’s still staggering under scaling difficulties and poor retention rates, while a slew of competitors — Metaplace, Multiverse, HiPiHi, whatever Google’s cooking up, and near a dozen more — are attempting to outgun Linden Lab on their own terms. They’re creating new MMO platforms that’ll also feature avatar-based content creation where users own their IP, and some will probably do it better than Linden is right now. The ferocity of this competition proves one thing: from the market’s perspective, what Second Life originally unleashed is simply not going away.
Population Metrics NEED to be reevaluated
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2007/02/14/second-life-reveals-true-population-statistics
Submitted by Scott Goldberg on February 14, 2007
*needs to be referenced****
You have to give credit to Linden Lab for being honest. In a blog posted February 9th, the company described its “drive toward complete transparency and openness” by revealing key metrics in the virtual world. The most important figure – and the cause for the Second Life craze to begin with – is the total population, which as of today is listed at 3.6 million on the homepage. But the number of unique users, as the company points out in its new statistical analysis, is a little over half that at about 2 million.
But even that is misleading, as Clay Shirky at Valleywag put it, “Second Life doesn't have two million users. They have had two million users over the life of the service, and they've lost most of them. Of those users, the majority -- something like 5 out of 6 -- bailed in the first month.”
The article continues with John Zdanowski, the Linden employee who posted the figures, writing, "Approximately 10% of unique users have logged in for 40 hours or more." As Shirky says, “The plain meaning of that sentence is that fewer than 200,000 people have given Second Life even a cumulative work week of their time, over the history of the platform.”
The truth about Second Life’s user rate and population should come as little surprise to anyone who has tried it. For one, it requires enormous First Life free time and because the content is user generated, the virtual world is exceedingly slow. And the opportunity to make money? Sure, it’s possible, but it would be naïve to think it’s a guarantee (because again, having a First Life seriously impedes your progress to a productive Second Life).
I think population metrics in all forms of online social media – MySpace, Facebook, Second Life, etc. – needs to be reevaluated. There are countless stories of people who logged on to a service, created an account, tried it for a few days, and never used it again. Yet those people are included in a site’s “population” and its “unique users,” which is deceiving. We need to see measurements that include dormant accounts over three and six-month periods. It’s fine if a company wants to brag about the number of people who have given their site a look, but the important figure is the number of people who make that service a daily part of their lives. Until that information is more readily available, it’s all just hype and fluff.
Submitted by Scott Goldberg on February 14, 2007
*needs to be referenced****
You have to give credit to Linden Lab for being honest. In a blog posted February 9th, the company described its “drive toward complete transparency and openness” by revealing key metrics in the virtual world. The most important figure – and the cause for the Second Life craze to begin with – is the total population, which as of today is listed at 3.6 million on the homepage. But the number of unique users, as the company points out in its new statistical analysis, is a little over half that at about 2 million.
But even that is misleading, as Clay Shirky at Valleywag put it, “Second Life doesn't have two million users. They have had two million users over the life of the service, and they've lost most of them. Of those users, the majority -- something like 5 out of 6 -- bailed in the first month.”
The article continues with John Zdanowski, the Linden employee who posted the figures, writing, "Approximately 10% of unique users have logged in for 40 hours or more." As Shirky says, “The plain meaning of that sentence is that fewer than 200,000 people have given Second Life even a cumulative work week of their time, over the history of the platform.”
The truth about Second Life’s user rate and population should come as little surprise to anyone who has tried it. For one, it requires enormous First Life free time and because the content is user generated, the virtual world is exceedingly slow. And the opportunity to make money? Sure, it’s possible, but it would be naïve to think it’s a guarantee (because again, having a First Life seriously impedes your progress to a productive Second Life).
I think population metrics in all forms of online social media – MySpace, Facebook, Second Life, etc. – needs to be reevaluated. There are countless stories of people who logged on to a service, created an account, tried it for a few days, and never used it again. Yet those people are included in a site’s “population” and its “unique users,” which is deceiving. We need to see measurements that include dormant accounts over three and six-month periods. It’s fine if a company wants to brag about the number of people who have given their site a look, but the important figure is the number of people who make that service a daily part of their lives. Until that information is more readily available, it’s all just hype and fluff.
Learning the Facts of Second Life (Harsh Shallow Criticism)
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2006/11/06/learning-the-facts-of-second-life
Submitted by Scott Goldberg on November 6, 2006
Writer Claims:
You cant have fun in Second Life without money
Everything in Second Life is about buying and selling
Top 5 places of popularity are for sex
Linden Lab are just profit seeking and are sick of having to maintain it
It is slow
Only for people who have lots of time in real life
The Responses people have:
Its often slow yes but improving
For most people a minor amount of money is essential
The places for sex are inhabiting by zombie avatars to gain popularity
This was a quick shallow interpretation of Second Life. It takes time to explore.
Updated Proposal...again
Chapter 1 will discuss all the theories surrounding online games, virtual reality, and cyber culture. Where did they originate? ‘New Media:A Critical Introduction’ Why they became popular? Why people disconnect from real life? ‘Cyberculture Theorist’ What happens to the person behind the screen? The debate over role-playing and identity. ‘The Second Self’ and ‘Life on the Screen’. Whilst drawing contiual reference to the ever growing blurred line between ‘real’ and ‘reality’. With reference to Jean Baudrillard. I will also explore how Second Life came about with ‘Snow Crash’.
Chapter 2 will look at initial impressions of Second Life. A brief account of how it works and what it consists of. What can one expect to see and do? I will address some of the misconceptions people may have, as well as explaining my first impressions. This Chapter will also include surveys from ‘real’ people as well as ‘avatars’. And hopefully have interviews with some of the ‘big’ characters in Second Life (the owner of Dublin, Owen Kelly etc.)
Chapter 3 will explore all the positive uses for Second Life. By using economic, social, educational and creative examples I will prove the effects it will have on our future and when we can expect synthetic worlds to become daily technology. It will also look at how its helping people to become socially acceptable, with particular reference to disabled people.
In comparison to the previous chapter, Chapter 4 will critically analyse the dangers and negative ideology with Second Life. I will look at the recent ‘Wonderland’ child pornography scandal that shocked worldwide media and caused mass debate about how ‘real’ something needs to be before it is classified as ‘real’. I will also explore the controversial debate over whether Second Life is as popular as it claims to be (looking at the facts and figures of users who log on). It will also draw reference to the identity issue explored in Chapter 1, and why (if so) we should begin to avoid these often dangerous forms of technology. It will also look at gambling and sex.
The conclusion will hopefully raise and answer many of the questions that I had previous to writing this thesis. What have I found, what do the mass public think, what they predict? After looking at all the history, the theoris and by assessing all the positives and negatives I will be able to make a significant reflection on the idea of synthetic worlds.
Chapter 2 will look at initial impressions of Second Life. A brief account of how it works and what it consists of. What can one expect to see and do? I will address some of the misconceptions people may have, as well as explaining my first impressions. This Chapter will also include surveys from ‘real’ people as well as ‘avatars’. And hopefully have interviews with some of the ‘big’ characters in Second Life (the owner of Dublin, Owen Kelly etc.)
Chapter 3 will explore all the positive uses for Second Life. By using economic, social, educational and creative examples I will prove the effects it will have on our future and when we can expect synthetic worlds to become daily technology. It will also look at how its helping people to become socially acceptable, with particular reference to disabled people.
In comparison to the previous chapter, Chapter 4 will critically analyse the dangers and negative ideology with Second Life. I will look at the recent ‘Wonderland’ child pornography scandal that shocked worldwide media and caused mass debate about how ‘real’ something needs to be before it is classified as ‘real’. I will also explore the controversial debate over whether Second Life is as popular as it claims to be (looking at the facts and figures of users who log on). It will also draw reference to the identity issue explored in Chapter 1, and why (if so) we should begin to avoid these often dangerous forms of technology. It will also look at gambling and sex.
The conclusion will hopefully raise and answer many of the questions that I had previous to writing this thesis. What have I found, what do the mass public think, what they predict? After looking at all the history, the theoris and by assessing all the positives and negatives I will be able to make a significant reflection on the idea of synthetic worlds.
SL as Medical Learning
View reports and aritcles about Play2Train which is a virtual training space in SecondLife for medical and emergency units.
'Very few hospitals can afford or orchestrate the chaos and downtime that would result from a simulated pandemic or other disaster. Until recently, emergency preparedness activities were limited to discussions, not action. A virtual training environment, however, provides realistic scenarios and lifelike activity contained safely in a computer.'
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name
http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/papers/Steinkuehler_jcmc2006.pdf
...explains how avatar-mediated social interaction enables her to play a leader in the virtual world in ways she is typically unable (or, more accurately, not allowed) to in "real life." This sense of moratorium from stratified daily social life enables MMOs to function as kind of level playing field and, in part, may explain some of their popular appeal: Like sports, MMOs appeal to people in part because they represent meritocracies otherwise unavailable in a world often filled with unfairness (Huizenga, 1949). Players are able to enter a world in which success is based not on out-of-game status but on in-game talent, wit, diligence, and hard work.
...explains how avatar-mediated social interaction enables her to play a leader in the virtual world in ways she is typically unable (or, more accurately, not allowed) to in "real life." This sense of moratorium from stratified daily social life enables MMOs to function as kind of level playing field and, in part, may explain some of their popular appeal: Like sports, MMOs appeal to people in part because they represent meritocracies otherwise unavailable in a world often filled with unfairness (Huizenga, 1949). Players are able to enter a world in which success is based not on out-of-game status but on in-game talent, wit, diligence, and hard work.
Second Life Insider: Responce to the Media outrage of 'Wonderland'!
Virtual Ageplay Still Too Real
Posted Oct 30th 2007 1:10PM by Akela Talamasca
http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/10/30/virtual-ageplay-still-too-real/
Sky News, previously covered here, has 'discovered' Wonderland, a sim in which Ageplay is condoned at best, and encouraged at worst. A representative from the Kid Avs community has made this statement: "It's really upset alot of us as we've known about this place and its reputation for weeks, and no matter how much we AR linden lab or IM the Lindens ourselves, they don't seem to want to close it down. Now it's our Kid Av community that's going to get it in the neck. Its like, what was the point of starting up all those policy reviews about broadly offensive behaviour, then not doing anything when a real problem sim appears? Its very frustrating, all our hard work ignored."
Now, let's understand a few things here. According to the article, "Wonderland is a virtual children's playground where paedophiles cruise and kids are solicited," said Jason Farrell, a Sky News reporter who's reportedly been researching this for some time. Well, on the surface of it, there's no actual proof, once again, that these child avatars are being driven by actual children. It's likelier that these are adults roleplaying as children. Regardless, this is exactly the sort of 'broadly offensive' behavior that Linden Lab is famously against, yet nothing has been done about Wonderland, despite repeated entreaties over a period of weeks from the community of residents who roleplay nonsexual children. Of course, the mainstream press pick this up and run with it, making Linden Lab look bad, the child avatar community look bad, and all of us in Second Life look bad by tenuous association.
Posted Oct 30th 2007 1:10PM by Akela Talamasca
http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/10/30/virtual-ageplay-still-too-real/
Sky News, previously covered here, has 'discovered' Wonderland, a sim in which Ageplay is condoned at best, and encouraged at worst. A representative from the Kid Avs community has made this statement: "It's really upset alot of us as we've known about this place and its reputation for weeks, and no matter how much we AR linden lab or IM the Lindens ourselves, they don't seem to want to close it down. Now it's our Kid Av community that's going to get it in the neck. Its like, what was the point of starting up all those policy reviews about broadly offensive behaviour, then not doing anything when a real problem sim appears? Its very frustrating, all our hard work ignored."
Now, let's understand a few things here. According to the article, "Wonderland is a virtual children's playground where paedophiles cruise and kids are solicited," said Jason Farrell, a Sky News reporter who's reportedly been researching this for some time. Well, on the surface of it, there's no actual proof, once again, that these child avatars are being driven by actual children. It's likelier that these are adults roleplaying as children. Regardless, this is exactly the sort of 'broadly offensive' behavior that Linden Lab is famously against, yet nothing has been done about Wonderland, despite repeated entreaties over a period of weeks from the community of residents who roleplay nonsexual children. Of course, the mainstream press pick this up and run with it, making Linden Lab look bad, the child avatar community look bad, and all of us in Second Life look bad by tenuous association.
Cyber Rape?
German Prosecutors Pursue Child Porn in 'Second Life'
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2481582,00.html
Blogger opinions were mixed after a German TV news magazine uncovered virtual child sex within the virtual-reality community. Prosecutors in Halle are investigating "persons unknown" with a view toward bringing charges.
"We'll try to find out the name of the person responsible," Senior Prosecutor Peter Vogt of the Division for the Prevention of Child Pornography told the TV news magazine Report Mainz. "This sort of criminal activity is punishable by a term of imprisonment of between three months and five years."
The news magazine documented that juvenile alter egos in the virtual community Second Life, called avatars, were being used to simulate child sex -- and being sold for virtual profits within the alternate reality platform.
Robin Harper, vice president of Linden Lab, which runs Second Life, told the television program that the company would investigate who was behind the images and pass on the information to the police.
But child-protection activists have criticized Linden Lab for not programming its site to reject child-sex images, and psychologists worry that such role playing could encourage real cases of child abuse.
Cyber-rape?
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: German law prohibits not only real, but "realistic" child porn
This isn't the first sex-related controversy surrounding Second Life. In recent months, objections have been raised to the alleged "cyber-raping" of users' avatars.
But the presence of depictions of juveniles makes this an especially sensitive case. The story was picked up by most major German papers, and readers responding to it online have engaged in a heated debate about the legal ramifications.
Roughly half of the respondents do not think sexual depictions of juvenile avatars warrant police action.
"As disgusting as I find the idea of someone enjoying virtual sex with children," wrote an online reader of the daily newspaper Die Welt, "we shouldn't forget one thing: this is about something fictional, a virtual world, and thank God no real child has actually suffered."
Some think prosecutors should concentrate on real cases of child abuse and accuse police of an Orwellian attempt to punish thoughtcrime. Other users point out that while virtual child sex is illegal in Germany, it isn't in the United States.
Slippery slope?
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: German police have been cracking down on child porn
But users on the other side of the issue say that child-sex role playing online could be a first step leading to real child abuse.
"If measures to prevent virtual child pornography can protect even one child from being harmed by a pedophile who has made the jump from the virtual to the real," wrote one online reader of the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, "then I would welcome them in any form."
A Welt user concurred: "It's disgusting that this sort of thing is portrayed as harmless, and blame shifted to the prosecutors."
And a fellow respondent simply wrote, "Second Life is a platform for people who have no first lives."
Second Life has been growing in popularity in Germany, where the number of registered users now exceeds that in the US. Under Germany law possession of "virtual" child pornography is punishable by up to three years in jail.
This was done by sky news about the debate surrounding 'Wonderland'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN_jr6xjs90
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2481582,00.html
Blogger opinions were mixed after a German TV news magazine uncovered virtual child sex within the virtual-reality community. Prosecutors in Halle are investigating "persons unknown" with a view toward bringing charges.
"We'll try to find out the name of the person responsible," Senior Prosecutor Peter Vogt of the Division for the Prevention of Child Pornography told the TV news magazine Report Mainz. "This sort of criminal activity is punishable by a term of imprisonment of between three months and five years."
The news magazine documented that juvenile alter egos in the virtual community Second Life, called avatars, were being used to simulate child sex -- and being sold for virtual profits within the alternate reality platform.
Robin Harper, vice president of Linden Lab, which runs Second Life, told the television program that the company would investigate who was behind the images and pass on the information to the police.
But child-protection activists have criticized Linden Lab for not programming its site to reject child-sex images, and psychologists worry that such role playing could encourage real cases of child abuse.
Cyber-rape?
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: German law prohibits not only real, but "realistic" child porn
This isn't the first sex-related controversy surrounding Second Life. In recent months, objections have been raised to the alleged "cyber-raping" of users' avatars.
But the presence of depictions of juveniles makes this an especially sensitive case. The story was picked up by most major German papers, and readers responding to it online have engaged in a heated debate about the legal ramifications.
Roughly half of the respondents do not think sexual depictions of juvenile avatars warrant police action.
"As disgusting as I find the idea of someone enjoying virtual sex with children," wrote an online reader of the daily newspaper Die Welt, "we shouldn't forget one thing: this is about something fictional, a virtual world, and thank God no real child has actually suffered."
Some think prosecutors should concentrate on real cases of child abuse and accuse police of an Orwellian attempt to punish thoughtcrime. Other users point out that while virtual child sex is illegal in Germany, it isn't in the United States.
Slippery slope?
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: German police have been cracking down on child porn
But users on the other side of the issue say that child-sex role playing online could be a first step leading to real child abuse.
"If measures to prevent virtual child pornography can protect even one child from being harmed by a pedophile who has made the jump from the virtual to the real," wrote one online reader of the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, "then I would welcome them in any form."
A Welt user concurred: "It's disgusting that this sort of thing is portrayed as harmless, and blame shifted to the prosecutors."
And a fellow respondent simply wrote, "Second Life is a platform for people who have no first lives."
Second Life has been growing in popularity in Germany, where the number of registered users now exceeds that in the US. Under Germany law possession of "virtual" child pornography is punishable by up to three years in jail.
This was done by sky news about the debate surrounding 'Wonderland'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN_jr6xjs90
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Second Life: Over-hyped or scientifically significant?
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13555_1-9770470-34.html
Posted by Steve Tobak September 4, 2007
-------------
We're constantly imitating nature.
Artificial intelligence researchers study the way babies learn to right themselves after falling down to help train robots to behave similarly.
We're still learning new things about flight dynamics and wing design from butterflies and other animals.
If you've ever carefully tiptoed across the floor to keep from disturbing someone, you're mimicking how a deer walks to avoid alerting predators to its presence.
Okay, that one's a stretch, but if you've ever watched a deer do this, it sure seems like one heck of a coincidence.
In any case, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It's also how modern science works - creating models for simple structures in order to approximate the real world. When we succeed, we learn; when we fail, we learn more. It's a painstaking process of trial and error called the scientific method.
Every year the biotechnology industry comes one step closer to learning how to cure our ills and extend the human lifespan. We have further to go than we've come, to be sure, but getting here was no easy trick. After all, biotech research is attempting nothing short of unveiling the secrets of life.
Why am I telling you all this? Because, this is the same thought process that changed my opinion about Second Life being over-hyped - an opinion many of you have recently expressed.
For the uninitiated, Second Life is an online digital world called a metaverse. People are rendered as game-like, 3D images called avatars. In the metaverse you can own property, hold business meetings and training sessions, buy and sell goods and services, dance, fly, and meet people. There's even crime.
Second Life was developed by a venture backed startup named Linden Lab. But Neal Stephenson initially described the concept of a metaverse in his groundbreaking cyber-novel Snow Crash, published in 1992.
As a lifelong sci-fi fan who read the book, I joined Second Life about a year ago. I just wanted to see what it was like. I was prepared for a half-baked environment, and in that sense, Second Life met my expectations. Overall, the experience was still a bit disappointing.
I didn't so much mind my clothes disappearing in the middle of a conversation, or looking stupid because I couldn't figure out how to sit in a chair or dance. It was the bugs, instability, and slow response time that really bogged down the experience.
After a few weeks I decided it wasn't that much fun and I didn't have any business reason to be there, at least not yet. So I gave up on Second Life and its hype for the time being.
Then I got to wondering - is there a perspective on this metaverse thing I perhaps overlooked during my initial experience?
After all, what is Second Life and others like it but a first attempt at replicating our world in virtual space? That's huge. The implications are no different from space travel, robotics, stem cell research, or any other significant advancement in science. As such, it warrants attention and scrutiny so people can learn from other's mistakes and become inspired to take the technology to the next level.
Think about it. Not that long ago there was no internet, now we depend on it. A scant nine years ago, Google's founders were having trouble getting funding for a search engine company. Now its market cap is $160 billion. Who's to say we won't find ourselves completely immersed in virtual reality worlds in ten years?
And Second Life - even in its present form - is a potentially significant development platform, not to mention a business opportunity to drive demand for internet infrastructure, processing power, memory capacity, software, gaming, and the like. I don't even want to consider the implications for pornography.
Not only is imitation the sincerest form of flattery, it's also a primary mechanism for the advancement of human civilization. Second Life may have a long way to go to fulfill its hype, but as the first baby steps toward imitating the real world in cyberspace, it demands close attention. After all, that's how we humans learn.
Posted by Steve Tobak September 4, 2007
-------------
We're constantly imitating nature.
Artificial intelligence researchers study the way babies learn to right themselves after falling down to help train robots to behave similarly.
We're still learning new things about flight dynamics and wing design from butterflies and other animals.
If you've ever carefully tiptoed across the floor to keep from disturbing someone, you're mimicking how a deer walks to avoid alerting predators to its presence.
Okay, that one's a stretch, but if you've ever watched a deer do this, it sure seems like one heck of a coincidence.
In any case, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It's also how modern science works - creating models for simple structures in order to approximate the real world. When we succeed, we learn; when we fail, we learn more. It's a painstaking process of trial and error called the scientific method.
Every year the biotechnology industry comes one step closer to learning how to cure our ills and extend the human lifespan. We have further to go than we've come, to be sure, but getting here was no easy trick. After all, biotech research is attempting nothing short of unveiling the secrets of life.
Why am I telling you all this? Because, this is the same thought process that changed my opinion about Second Life being over-hyped - an opinion many of you have recently expressed.
For the uninitiated, Second Life is an online digital world called a metaverse. People are rendered as game-like, 3D images called avatars. In the metaverse you can own property, hold business meetings and training sessions, buy and sell goods and services, dance, fly, and meet people. There's even crime.
Second Life was developed by a venture backed startup named Linden Lab. But Neal Stephenson initially described the concept of a metaverse in his groundbreaking cyber-novel Snow Crash, published in 1992.
As a lifelong sci-fi fan who read the book, I joined Second Life about a year ago. I just wanted to see what it was like. I was prepared for a half-baked environment, and in that sense, Second Life met my expectations. Overall, the experience was still a bit disappointing.
I didn't so much mind my clothes disappearing in the middle of a conversation, or looking stupid because I couldn't figure out how to sit in a chair or dance. It was the bugs, instability, and slow response time that really bogged down the experience.
After a few weeks I decided it wasn't that much fun and I didn't have any business reason to be there, at least not yet. So I gave up on Second Life and its hype for the time being.
Then I got to wondering - is there a perspective on this metaverse thing I perhaps overlooked during my initial experience?
After all, what is Second Life and others like it but a first attempt at replicating our world in virtual space? That's huge. The implications are no different from space travel, robotics, stem cell research, or any other significant advancement in science. As such, it warrants attention and scrutiny so people can learn from other's mistakes and become inspired to take the technology to the next level.
Think about it. Not that long ago there was no internet, now we depend on it. A scant nine years ago, Google's founders were having trouble getting funding for a search engine company. Now its market cap is $160 billion. Who's to say we won't find ourselves completely immersed in virtual reality worlds in ten years?
And Second Life - even in its present form - is a potentially significant development platform, not to mention a business opportunity to drive demand for internet infrastructure, processing power, memory capacity, software, gaming, and the like. I don't even want to consider the implications for pornography.
Not only is imitation the sincerest form of flattery, it's also a primary mechanism for the advancement of human civilization. Second Life may have a long way to go to fulfill its hype, but as the first baby steps toward imitating the real world in cyberspace, it demands close attention. After all, that's how we humans learn.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Skepticism about the number of users within SL...
http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/12/12/second_life_what_are_the_real_numbers.php
Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand. Were the press to shift to reporting Recently Logged In as their best approximation of the population, the number of reported users would shrink by an order of magnitude; were they to adopt industry-standard unique users reporting (assuming they could get those numbers), the reported population would probably drop by two orders. If the growth isn’t as currently advertised (and it isn’t), then the value from scarcity is overstated, and if the value of scarcity is overstated, at least one of the engines of growth will cool down.
There’s nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived.
Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand. Were the press to shift to reporting Recently Logged In as their best approximation of the population, the number of reported users would shrink by an order of magnitude; were they to adopt industry-standard unique users reporting (assuming they could get those numbers), the reported population would probably drop by two orders. If the growth isn’t as currently advertised (and it isn’t), then the value from scarcity is overstated, and if the value of scarcity is overstated, at least one of the engines of growth will cool down.
There’s nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived.
Are Avatars more real than people?
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/scifi/ns/hutson.html -Matthew Hutson
The virtual environments in Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash differ dramatically from those inWilliam Gibson's Neuromancer. In Gibson's world, readers (and possibly the characters themselves) tumble helplessly through unfamiliar whirlpools of information. Technology, which has built layers upon layers of abstractions that engulf the uninitiated voyager, provides meager bridgework between our world and his world of the far future. Upon entering the computer, one can fly or swim around through grids of data and break through sheets of ice and approach pink boxes, and this all seems somewhat possible to visualize, but this environment is merely a joystick-like device for manipulating more distanced, abstract operations. This visualizationability of the virtual world also does not inherently correspond to any kind of actions that we would ever perform in the real world.
On the other hand, Stephenson describes the Metaverse, the predominate virtual environment in the book, as a street very much like a street in real life. There are buildings, people walking around, etc. In fact, virtuanauts and virtuagoverners (whoever they are . . .) often try quite hard to emulate their everydaylives despite the freedom that this technology offers. Although Stephenson avoids going off the deep end the way Gibson does, I find his restraints quite appalling.
As the characters state repeatedly, there are no laws in the real world. Why? Possibly because there is no institution ubiquitous enough to enforce them. In the Metaverse, however, there are innumerable laws. As the existence and compatibility of every object and every person within that world rests upon software and hardware developers, this imposes many inherent limitations. For instance, one cannot punch someone in the street, because flesh provides no resistance, and one cannot go to the bathroom because no one bothered to write code for that. Besides unavoidable restrictions within this world due to technology, there also exist a great deal of rules that need not be there, but that have been imposed anyway. For instance, one cannot control an avatar that is taller than the virtuanaut's real body. (There are also some larger conceptual problems with the Metaverse. There is no central government to rule Reality: jurisdiction is cut up among independent corporations. So who enforces the Metaverse? Who hires the programmers? Who inspects zoning regulations?)
As Glen Sanford points out, the Street is also limited by the socioeconomic conditions of the players. One cannot escape distinguishing stigma even in a world where nearly anything is possible. Theoretically, one could enter the world as a kangaroo, as a zamboni, as a worm, but people are stuck with bodies that display loudly and clearly conditions that one may be entering a virtual world to avoid. One can spot and prejudge a grainy, black and white avatar from a mile off. Wealth and power is manifest not in extravagant jaunts into fantasy worlds (such as Neverland) but strict reproduction of everyday reality. On page 222, Ng "ostentatious[ly]" presents a glass with condensation on it that reflected light from the surrounding room. Rather than exploring possibilities distant from reality, enhancing our society, stretching our imaginations, we (rather a future "we") sit and try to reproduce what already exists more and more accurately, slowing cultural evolution to a standstill. To be honest, I find this future much more diheartening than anything in Gibson's books.
Dan Parke also elaborates upon the strict limitations of the Metaverse. He provides a couple of possibilities explaining why Stephenson made that choices that he did. First, Dan offers the reason that a Metaverse much different from our own would confuse, intimidate, or frighten many users. He describes this adherence to the laws of Reality as "a security blanket for the uncreative folk who write family sitcoms." It just makes things simpler to stick to the laws of physics and cultural artifacts with which we are familiar. He also offers that perhaps this is one of Stephenson's satirical devices; Stephenson holds constant part of the reality with which we, the reader, are familiar, so that he can then focus upon ridiculing a different part of the world.
Now I have a couple of complaints about this partial applicability of satire, or at least how Stephenson uses it here. If the idea is to hold some things constant while focusing the satire on other things, why did he stretch things that seem to have little satirical value? There is little consistency in his method. Example: why is it that one's avatar can't be taller than one's real body, but one's avatar can be a huge penis? His arbitrarily chosen points of satire obscure his intent, confuse the reader, and in general make the Metaverse really spooky. (What are the pall-bearing daemons meant to signify?)
Without commenting on Stephenson's intentions, Caleb Neelon describes the effect of this strictly-realistic-virtual-reality thing. He realized that the plot and much of the main content was bogus, and thus shifted his attention towards the surrounding satirical commentary. Whether he laughed at Stephenson or with him, Caleb extracted what he wanted.
I cannot, however, ignore the possibility that this SRVR (see preceding paragraph) is not a purely intentional device for satire but rather a failure on the part of Stephenson. Perhaps this is truly how he imagines the future of virtuality. He may have prescribed a more accurate description of future technology, as Glen Sanford claims (and as we have witnessed so far in real life), but he really didn't reach very far. Gibson's ideas are drastic, far-fetched, risky. Stephenson's are mildly imaginative but largely more boring than real life.
The virtual environments in Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash differ dramatically from those inWilliam Gibson's Neuromancer. In Gibson's world, readers (and possibly the characters themselves) tumble helplessly through unfamiliar whirlpools of information. Technology, which has built layers upon layers of abstractions that engulf the uninitiated voyager, provides meager bridgework between our world and his world of the far future. Upon entering the computer, one can fly or swim around through grids of data and break through sheets of ice and approach pink boxes, and this all seems somewhat possible to visualize, but this environment is merely a joystick-like device for manipulating more distanced, abstract operations. This visualizationability of the virtual world also does not inherently correspond to any kind of actions that we would ever perform in the real world.
On the other hand, Stephenson describes the Metaverse, the predominate virtual environment in the book, as a street very much like a street in real life. There are buildings, people walking around, etc. In fact, virtuanauts and virtuagoverners (whoever they are . . .) often try quite hard to emulate their everydaylives despite the freedom that this technology offers. Although Stephenson avoids going off the deep end the way Gibson does, I find his restraints quite appalling.
As the characters state repeatedly, there are no laws in the real world. Why? Possibly because there is no institution ubiquitous enough to enforce them. In the Metaverse, however, there are innumerable laws. As the existence and compatibility of every object and every person within that world rests upon software and hardware developers, this imposes many inherent limitations. For instance, one cannot punch someone in the street, because flesh provides no resistance, and one cannot go to the bathroom because no one bothered to write code for that. Besides unavoidable restrictions within this world due to technology, there also exist a great deal of rules that need not be there, but that have been imposed anyway. For instance, one cannot control an avatar that is taller than the virtuanaut's real body. (There are also some larger conceptual problems with the Metaverse. There is no central government to rule Reality: jurisdiction is cut up among independent corporations. So who enforces the Metaverse? Who hires the programmers? Who inspects zoning regulations?)
As Glen Sanford points out, the Street is also limited by the socioeconomic conditions of the players. One cannot escape distinguishing stigma even in a world where nearly anything is possible. Theoretically, one could enter the world as a kangaroo, as a zamboni, as a worm, but people are stuck with bodies that display loudly and clearly conditions that one may be entering a virtual world to avoid. One can spot and prejudge a grainy, black and white avatar from a mile off. Wealth and power is manifest not in extravagant jaunts into fantasy worlds (such as Neverland) but strict reproduction of everyday reality. On page 222, Ng "ostentatious[ly]" presents a glass with condensation on it that reflected light from the surrounding room. Rather than exploring possibilities distant from reality, enhancing our society, stretching our imaginations, we (rather a future "we") sit and try to reproduce what already exists more and more accurately, slowing cultural evolution to a standstill. To be honest, I find this future much more diheartening than anything in Gibson's books.
Dan Parke also elaborates upon the strict limitations of the Metaverse. He provides a couple of possibilities explaining why Stephenson made that choices that he did. First, Dan offers the reason that a Metaverse much different from our own would confuse, intimidate, or frighten many users. He describes this adherence to the laws of Reality as "a security blanket for the uncreative folk who write family sitcoms." It just makes things simpler to stick to the laws of physics and cultural artifacts with which we are familiar. He also offers that perhaps this is one of Stephenson's satirical devices; Stephenson holds constant part of the reality with which we, the reader, are familiar, so that he can then focus upon ridiculing a different part of the world.
Now I have a couple of complaints about this partial applicability of satire, or at least how Stephenson uses it here. If the idea is to hold some things constant while focusing the satire on other things, why did he stretch things that seem to have little satirical value? There is little consistency in his method. Example: why is it that one's avatar can't be taller than one's real body, but one's avatar can be a huge penis? His arbitrarily chosen points of satire obscure his intent, confuse the reader, and in general make the Metaverse really spooky. (What are the pall-bearing daemons meant to signify?)
Without commenting on Stephenson's intentions, Caleb Neelon describes the effect of this strictly-realistic-virtual-reality thing. He realized that the plot and much of the main content was bogus, and thus shifted his attention towards the surrounding satirical commentary. Whether he laughed at Stephenson or with him, Caleb extracted what he wanted.
I cannot, however, ignore the possibility that this SRVR (see preceding paragraph) is not a purely intentional device for satire but rather a failure on the part of Stephenson. Perhaps this is truly how he imagines the future of virtuality. He may have prescribed a more accurate description of future technology, as Glen Sanford claims (and as we have witnessed so far in real life), but he really didn't reach very far. Gibson's ideas are drastic, far-fetched, risky. Stephenson's are mildly imaginative but largely more boring than real life.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Updated proposal
- Title:Is Second Life the future? (working title)
- Abstract: A description of my thesis
- Introduction: What is cyberspace, virtual world, online communities, MMO's, and Second Life? Definitions of these similar and overlapping words that I will continue to use throughout the thesis
- Chapter 1-Literature review: 'New Media: A Critical Introduction', Martin Lister, John Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant and Kiernan Kelly. I will look at their concepts of network, communities and particularly their ideas about online identities. 'Cyberculture Theorists', Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway. I will explore why cybercultures are so significant. 'Snow Crash' Neal Stephenson. Explore the idea behind Second Life and where it orginated. I will also look at other books like Sherry Turkle etc...
- Chapter 2- Experiencing Second Life: An indepth look at experiencing the online world at first glance. What can one expect to see and do? Initial assumptions.
- Chapter 3- The possibilties: Business, economic, creative, social, education
- Chapter 4- The controversy: Attitudes and negativity about online worlds
- Conclusion: Whether or not Second life (and other online worlds) will have the ability to be as widespread, important, and groundbreaking as other technological advancements like the internet? What is the future? Will it detract from our real lives and become apart of us? Has the line between real and imaginary been crossed? Is the future Second Life?
- Possible Surveys and Case Studys...
I may use case studies, surveys, questionaires, and graphs to illustrate points and make some predictions. Some of these will be carried out in the real world and also 'inworld'.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Problems with virtual worlds...Home,SL, and WOW
Just as in the real one, virtual societies reflect humanity and that includes its darker aspects. But think back to when the Internet was first popularised. We had these same dicussions about the morals of the online world then. But still, we embraced of the World Wide Web, choosing to ignore some of the risks and mitigate the others by implementing new technologies and legislation. The same thing will play out in the virtual world.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/06/02/dlsecond02.xml&page=1
Trouble in online paradise-Chris Stevens
What began as an idyllic retreat for gamers and sci-fi fans has begun to sprout rotten polygons. From real-life murders and underground sweatshops, to money-laundering and child prostitution, virtual landscapes such as Second Life have shown that our migration to online worlds can be as traumatic and destructive as our colonisation of real ones.
Be all you can be: Second Life's residents are free to pick their own identity and new partners
Second Life has always aspired to recreate society; as it has grown in popularity and population, it has, quite naturally, begun to attract some of the internet's seedier characters. A disturbing behavioural science experiment has begun. William Golding would have been thrilled to witness his plotlines played out in the darker corners of our online islands, where the savagery of avatars drives some to riot and others to assault each other.
The appeal of virtual worlds is about to hit a new high, and Golding's pessimistic view of human nature could be tested on a massive scale. The relatively understated offerings from Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, are soon to be joined by virtual universes from companies that have a proven expertise in manipulative and seductive entertainment.
Consider the partnership between Big Brother producers Endemol, with games-maker Electronic Arts, creator of The Sims. These two companies intend to collaborate on a virtual world broadly similar to Second Life, called Virtual Me. While Endemol makes exceptionally addictive entertainment out of five morons sat in a hot tub, The Sims demands that you make sure your brainless Tamagotchi-human eats enough food and goes to bed on time. Combine these two world-leaders in turning banality into light entertainment and we might never leave our homes again.
Soon we'll get to see what a television production company would do if they were allowed to plan, police and govern a city. Were Endemol to advertise its virtual world alongside Big Brother, you can imagine the volume of residents such a place would attract, and the kind of environment Endemol might possibly provide them with. Would you want the producers of Big Brother as the architects of your virtual town? Endemol would be responsible for policing this online game: would they take the same view of exhibitionist behaviour in their virtual world as they do in the Big Brother house?
Then there's Sony, who are soon to release the PlayStation 3's virtual world, Home - a kind of hybrid between Second Life and the social-networking site Facebook. Again, the audience for this virtual world is massive and could quickly eclipse Second Life. Home is a slicker experience than Second Life, but it's also more insular. Sony's world doesn't have the virtual geography of Second Life - you can't walk between locations, you can only teleport. Most of the action takes place inside your virtual house, or those of your friends. While the basic house is free, it's not a very exciting place to live. You can pay Sony to add the trappings of consumer capitalism - a plasma television, a pool table, wooden floors, and modern art. Rather than meet up in real-life to play a game, Sony have virtualised the experience - you can meet up with friend's avatars and sit around a virtual console - erasing the only remaining real-life human interaction that a hardcore gamer might experience.
From what we've seen of Home so far, Sony have been very careful not to make it vulnerable to the problems of Second Life, but as a result, there's infinitely less scope for creativity in Home. The creators of virtual worlds are clearly struggling to find a balance between the freedom to invent in the virtual world, and the need to police them.
Careful of the company you keep: disputes in this virtual world have lead to conflicts in the real one
Unlike multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft, there is no broad gameplay element to Second Life, and no way to "win". You don't get points for leading a battalion of orcs into battle or fighting off giant turtles with a cranial drill. Residents are encouraged to talk, buy land, build and trade; its creators pitch it as a benign equivalent of the Wild West. The Second Life tagline reads: "Your World. Your Imagination", but Linden Labs has uncovered what a dangerous proposition this is when you consider what the human mind is capable of. Witnessing human avatars clumsily having sex with virtual animals is one of the consequences of giving perverse minds free rein in a virtual world, but there are more sinister aspects to Second Life, too. Some adult players dress as minors and then prostitute themselves in "age play" scenarios. Just last month, German prosecutors launched an investigation into players who were buying and selling sex with underage avatars. In some cases, the participants were offered child pornography outside the game.
Second Life's polygon world is powered by that great tradition: money. Players buy and sell in "Linden dollars" - Reuters track their value each day, as they do the dollar or the pound. The presence of cash accounts for many of the seediest corners of such virtual worlds, whether it's players posing as minors to sell virtual sex in Second Life, or real-life Chinese workers in Shanghai sweatshops playing around the clock as "gold farmers" in World of Warcraft (worldofwarcraft.com). Gold farms are tightly packed buildings full of men hunched over computers, paid to play multiplayer games and earn credits that can be sold to rich Westerners who don't have the time to devote to advancing in the game. It's a kind of battery farm for grown men, but instead of laying eggs, the human chickens play computer games in which real currencies change hands.
If you've never played in an online world before, it's difficult to appreciate how seriously players take these virtual experiences. Not only have some players died as a result of neglecting food and exercise, so engaged were they in their virtual existence, but some have killed in the real world as a result of disputes in the virtual one. An online gamer in Shanghai, 41-year-old Qiu Chengwei, stabbed Zhu Caoyuan several times in the chest after being told Zhu had sold his stolen "dragon sabre", used in the online game Legend of Mir 3. The sword was worth around £430, but the time and energy spent in winning the weapon in the game had been staggering. Qiu had apparently reported the theft to the police, but was told that they could not investigate the loss of virtual property. This might lead any reasonable person to conclude that some humans struggle to differentiate between the real and virtual world, but it's more likely that people sitting in dark rooms for days on end staring at graphics on a screen are predisposed to bizarre behaviour anyway.
As its bright graphics and friendly website would suggest, Second Life is in many ways a utopian re-imagining of the real world. Virtual sex-crimes and gold farming aside, there are enough good, decent folk to delight anyone who thought the spirit of the 1960s was dead. Much of the world is populated by creative types who come to build elaborate structures on land they've bought, attend university lectures, or discuss ideas. It's a kind of bohemian paradise, because in Second Life there are no wars, droughts or famines to put a downer on lofty ideology.
advertisement
There are, however, floods. Last month a rolling flood hit Second Life, but this flood wasn't caused by torrential rain, or a tsunami - instead, it originated in several of Second Life's servers, purposely engineered as part of a campaign to raise awareness of global warming. Residents logged on to discover their homes submerged. It was the kind of publicity stunt that would be prohibitively expensive to enact in real life. Ironically, National Geographic was quick to note that "because of the computer equipment required to power Second Life, people's online personas, or avatars, consume as much energy as the average real-world Brazilian", making the whole exercise rather hypocritical.
Our virtual worlds have begun to struggle with many of the same problems as emerging societies. If you were hoping to find escapism online, you should be prepared to run into trouble in paradise
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2007/06/02/dlsecond02.xml&page=1
Trouble in online paradise-Chris Stevens
What began as an idyllic retreat for gamers and sci-fi fans has begun to sprout rotten polygons. From real-life murders and underground sweatshops, to money-laundering and child prostitution, virtual landscapes such as Second Life have shown that our migration to online worlds can be as traumatic and destructive as our colonisation of real ones.
Be all you can be: Second Life's residents are free to pick their own identity and new partners
Second Life has always aspired to recreate society; as it has grown in popularity and population, it has, quite naturally, begun to attract some of the internet's seedier characters. A disturbing behavioural science experiment has begun. William Golding would have been thrilled to witness his plotlines played out in the darker corners of our online islands, where the savagery of avatars drives some to riot and others to assault each other.
The appeal of virtual worlds is about to hit a new high, and Golding's pessimistic view of human nature could be tested on a massive scale. The relatively understated offerings from Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, are soon to be joined by virtual universes from companies that have a proven expertise in manipulative and seductive entertainment.
Consider the partnership between Big Brother producers Endemol, with games-maker Electronic Arts, creator of The Sims. These two companies intend to collaborate on a virtual world broadly similar to Second Life, called Virtual Me. While Endemol makes exceptionally addictive entertainment out of five morons sat in a hot tub, The Sims demands that you make sure your brainless Tamagotchi-human eats enough food and goes to bed on time. Combine these two world-leaders in turning banality into light entertainment and we might never leave our homes again.
Soon we'll get to see what a television production company would do if they were allowed to plan, police and govern a city. Were Endemol to advertise its virtual world alongside Big Brother, you can imagine the volume of residents such a place would attract, and the kind of environment Endemol might possibly provide them with. Would you want the producers of Big Brother as the architects of your virtual town? Endemol would be responsible for policing this online game: would they take the same view of exhibitionist behaviour in their virtual world as they do in the Big Brother house?
Then there's Sony, who are soon to release the PlayStation 3's virtual world, Home - a kind of hybrid between Second Life and the social-networking site Facebook. Again, the audience for this virtual world is massive and could quickly eclipse Second Life. Home is a slicker experience than Second Life, but it's also more insular. Sony's world doesn't have the virtual geography of Second Life - you can't walk between locations, you can only teleport. Most of the action takes place inside your virtual house, or those of your friends. While the basic house is free, it's not a very exciting place to live. You can pay Sony to add the trappings of consumer capitalism - a plasma television, a pool table, wooden floors, and modern art. Rather than meet up in real-life to play a game, Sony have virtualised the experience - you can meet up with friend's avatars and sit around a virtual console - erasing the only remaining real-life human interaction that a hardcore gamer might experience.
From what we've seen of Home so far, Sony have been very careful not to make it vulnerable to the problems of Second Life, but as a result, there's infinitely less scope for creativity in Home. The creators of virtual worlds are clearly struggling to find a balance between the freedom to invent in the virtual world, and the need to police them.
Careful of the company you keep: disputes in this virtual world have lead to conflicts in the real one
Unlike multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft, there is no broad gameplay element to Second Life, and no way to "win". You don't get points for leading a battalion of orcs into battle or fighting off giant turtles with a cranial drill. Residents are encouraged to talk, buy land, build and trade; its creators pitch it as a benign equivalent of the Wild West. The Second Life tagline reads: "Your World. Your Imagination", but Linden Labs has uncovered what a dangerous proposition this is when you consider what the human mind is capable of. Witnessing human avatars clumsily having sex with virtual animals is one of the consequences of giving perverse minds free rein in a virtual world, but there are more sinister aspects to Second Life, too. Some adult players dress as minors and then prostitute themselves in "age play" scenarios. Just last month, German prosecutors launched an investigation into players who were buying and selling sex with underage avatars. In some cases, the participants were offered child pornography outside the game.
Second Life's polygon world is powered by that great tradition: money. Players buy and sell in "Linden dollars" - Reuters track their value each day, as they do the dollar or the pound. The presence of cash accounts for many of the seediest corners of such virtual worlds, whether it's players posing as minors to sell virtual sex in Second Life, or real-life Chinese workers in Shanghai sweatshops playing around the clock as "gold farmers" in World of Warcraft (worldofwarcraft.com). Gold farms are tightly packed buildings full of men hunched over computers, paid to play multiplayer games and earn credits that can be sold to rich Westerners who don't have the time to devote to advancing in the game. It's a kind of battery farm for grown men, but instead of laying eggs, the human chickens play computer games in which real currencies change hands.
If you've never played in an online world before, it's difficult to appreciate how seriously players take these virtual experiences. Not only have some players died as a result of neglecting food and exercise, so engaged were they in their virtual existence, but some have killed in the real world as a result of disputes in the virtual one. An online gamer in Shanghai, 41-year-old Qiu Chengwei, stabbed Zhu Caoyuan several times in the chest after being told Zhu had sold his stolen "dragon sabre", used in the online game Legend of Mir 3. The sword was worth around £430, but the time and energy spent in winning the weapon in the game had been staggering. Qiu had apparently reported the theft to the police, but was told that they could not investigate the loss of virtual property. This might lead any reasonable person to conclude that some humans struggle to differentiate between the real and virtual world, but it's more likely that people sitting in dark rooms for days on end staring at graphics on a screen are predisposed to bizarre behaviour anyway.
As its bright graphics and friendly website would suggest, Second Life is in many ways a utopian re-imagining of the real world. Virtual sex-crimes and gold farming aside, there are enough good, decent folk to delight anyone who thought the spirit of the 1960s was dead. Much of the world is populated by creative types who come to build elaborate structures on land they've bought, attend university lectures, or discuss ideas. It's a kind of bohemian paradise, because in Second Life there are no wars, droughts or famines to put a downer on lofty ideology.
advertisement
There are, however, floods. Last month a rolling flood hit Second Life, but this flood wasn't caused by torrential rain, or a tsunami - instead, it originated in several of Second Life's servers, purposely engineered as part of a campaign to raise awareness of global warming. Residents logged on to discover their homes submerged. It was the kind of publicity stunt that would be prohibitively expensive to enact in real life. Ironically, National Geographic was quick to note that "because of the computer equipment required to power Second Life, people's online personas, or avatars, consume as much energy as the average real-world Brazilian", making the whole exercise rather hypocritical.
Our virtual worlds have begun to struggle with many of the same problems as emerging societies. If you were hoping to find escapism online, you should be prepared to run into trouble in paradise
Some thoughts that come into my head
Thoughts...
If one finds their second life more enjoyable and stimulating than their first or 'real' life, what does this say about the individual? In my opinion it tells us more about society as a whole, rather than the personality and social inadequates of the person. If someone finds it easier to adopt a different persona and quite often 'be themselves' in an inworld environment rather than go outside their bedroom door and interact with the real world, then it is evident that this raises alarming questions about how incapable people are of accepting diverse groups of people within modern society.
SL Sex...
Whatever brings you to SL, you'll soon find that sex is everywhere. You'll be curious, and prolly tempted to jump in right away, and I bet you'll be surprised by what it's like in this strange virtual environment. The animated visual controls are more pornographic that most videos you could find in an adult store.
What I've done in Second Life...
I've had sex, drank a beer, smoked a joint, stuck a penis on my head. Is this my 'fantasy' or is it just a bit of light hearted fun!?
If one finds their second life more enjoyable and stimulating than their first or 'real' life, what does this say about the individual? In my opinion it tells us more about society as a whole, rather than the personality and social inadequates of the person. If someone finds it easier to adopt a different persona and quite often 'be themselves' in an inworld environment rather than go outside their bedroom door and interact with the real world, then it is evident that this raises alarming questions about how incapable people are of accepting diverse groups of people within modern society.
SL Sex...
Whatever brings you to SL, you'll soon find that sex is everywhere. You'll be curious, and prolly tempted to jump in right away, and I bet you'll be surprised by what it's like in this strange virtual environment. The animated visual controls are more pornographic that most videos you could find in an adult store.
What I've done in Second Life...
I've had sex, drank a beer, smoked a joint, stuck a penis on my head. Is this my 'fantasy' or is it just a bit of light hearted fun!?
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Is SL actually close to the tipping point where, like so many technologies before, it will flip into the mainstream with unanticipated results?
http://www.lunchoverip.com/2007/10/second-life-vir.html
Oct 2007, Susan Kish
When you raise the topic of Second Life (SL) in a conversation, you usually get one of two reactions: 1) Dismissal as “just another game”, “people should get their first life together first”, or 2) Rapt attention as questions start pouring out, and opportunities and risks are explored....
It's not a game: it's a social space. To get there, you go to secondlife.com and download a piece of software. It's free as long as you only want to "walk" around; you have to pay to buy local currency (the Linden, which is convertible into real dollars) or to buy virtual land (so you can build, invite your friends over, set up a shop, or resell).
**Second Life can not be looked at in isolation, or you will miss where it’s going. Our emerging future will include three separate kinds of “worlds” – the Real World, the Digital World (2D Web, Internet), and the Virtual World (3D Web).
This essay looks into these and other questions relevant to businesses in relation to the emergence of Virtual Worlds.
Oct 2007, Susan Kish
When you raise the topic of Second Life (SL) in a conversation, you usually get one of two reactions: 1) Dismissal as “just another game”, “people should get their first life together first”, or 2) Rapt attention as questions start pouring out, and opportunities and risks are explored....
It's not a game: it's a social space. To get there, you go to secondlife.com and download a piece of software. It's free as long as you only want to "walk" around; you have to pay to buy local currency (the Linden, which is convertible into real dollars) or to buy virtual land (so you can build, invite your friends over, set up a shop, or resell).
**Second Life can not be looked at in isolation, or you will miss where it’s going. Our emerging future will include three separate kinds of “worlds” – the Real World, the Digital World (2D Web, Internet), and the Virtual World (3D Web).
This essay looks into these and other questions relevant to businesses in relation to the emergence of Virtual Worlds.
Second Life: breaking the boundaries to experience endless possibilites
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/304033/16203652
part of the "The Transmission of Experience"by Bill Lichtenstein
...For the first time, there is a medium that can transmit an experience over the Internet, over a digital cable, to your computer screen. Mind you, experience is not just another sense. Experience is how we learn. It’s what forms and changes our attitudes and behaviors.
The first "platform" as they say in Internet speak, to facilitate the transmission of experience is called Second Life. It’s a web site that allows you to enter into a 3D virtual world, where you literally can go "through the looking glass" of two dimensional imagery and sound, to see, hear and experience anything that can be dreamed up. It’s based on 3D virtual reality technology that powers video games, but Second Life also incorporates a massive virtual community and real working economy that rival many small nations.
In Second Life, you can (as a 3D version of yourself that you create, called an avatar) walk, drive or fly, through thousands of imaginary lands built by the nearly 600,000 current "residents" whose own "avatars" reside there, as well, in virtual form. In Second Life you can experience the streets of Dublin, Ireland, which are so real that if you know your way around the city, you can walk to the Guinness factory, which is operational, and watch the virtual Guinness bottles on the assembly line. Or experience, as many of us did, the pride of watching hundreds of people walk a course that took hours, to raise $30,000 (in real money) for the American Cancer Society. (Those who experienced the cancer walk described a jolt of admiration each time someone passed by wearing a sign that said "cancer survivor," or as we offered our encouragement to someone walking by with a tag that read "lost my mom to breast cancer.")
You can sit out on a deck, listening to a live musical performance with 50 or 60 people, chatting as the sun sets over the water. Or stumble into a disco at 2AM, filled with beautiful people, flirting and dancing to a loud pulsating beat as smoke and stroke lights create a haze in the room. Or experience what it’s like to walk through a haute couture clothing store, buying "one of these" and "one of those" for your avatar to wear.
3D virtual reality involves not only what we can see and hear, but what we can experience, through our real time interaction within this virtual world. And what makes Second Life particularly powerful is that the graphics are deceptively real, allowing them to facilitate and provoke reminiscent and identifiable experiential feelings normally equated with specific real life experiences.
When that happens, when you get a feeling of an experience you know well and have had before, I would call that a "Second Life moment."
Second Life moments are not subjective and personal. More often than not, they are the result of careful visual and audio design. They are also predictable, and measurable, just as the careful design of a roller coaster provokes the shouts and screams of a car full of passengers at just the right spot, in a real life amusement park.
A "Second Life moment" is in fact a neurological response to a visual and audio cue, which for lack of a better word, I would call an "experiant."
An experiant, like a sound wave or a light wave, is the basic piece of sensory information being transmitted to the brain, through the eyes and ears, which, in the case of Second Life, tricks the mind into believing that you are experiencing a virtual event as real.
When you are in Second Life, you may be cognizant that you are in your office or living room, looking at your computer screen. But your brain is processing the input differently.
While in Second Life, you might find yourself sitting on a beach as the waves gentle roll in, or experience the butterflies in your stomach as you skydive hundreds of feet through the clouds.
What makes Second Life particularly powerful is that it has borrowed the best graphic techniques from the video gaming and animation industries. It has also integrated a social factor, involving a real working economy, with some people earning mid-six figures in real money ($US) selling everything from real estate to clothes for avatars to cutting-edge designed virtual furniture to offices and homes. Second Life also features a MySpace.com-like ability to form and maintain connections with people there, including real life friends and as well as those you meet "in world," as they say.
In Second Life, you are also free to just travel throughout the "SL world," as it is called, to experience what the other nearly 600,000 residents have built. You can also purchase your own 16-acre parcel of land, called a "sim," and develop it into whatever you want: a Tibetan shrine, a 1970s disco, a clothing emporium, your college dorm room, or anything you can imagine.
One thing to be noted is that the early years of Second Life, from 2004 to 2006, were focused largely on entertainment and diversion, not unlike the early days of many new media. (Consider, for example, that Edison’s early kinescopes, the forerunners of modern film, focused on the risqué and titillating. This included "The Kiss," a 20-second long short from 1896, which contained a depiction of the first cinematic kiss between a couple, and which became notorious as the first "film production" to be criticized as scandalous, bringing public demands for censorship.)
Likewise, Second Life, not unlike the Internet itself, contains the full range of human and cultural experiences, including a chance to live life on the edge. In-world, as it is called, you can choose to be anything you want, including a different sex or different sexual orientation. You can be tall or short, handsome or beautiful, or strange and fantastic. Young or old. Punk or Goth. Corporate or Fashionista. Experience the world as you would like, white, black or green. And if you can find it in Las Vegas, chances are you can find it in Second Life.
The promise of the medium for social and educational use was also evolving, and in the summer of 2006, Lichtenstein Creative Media, the Peabody Award-winning producers of the national, weekly public radio series, The Infinite Mind, paid for the construction of a 16-acre virtual broadcast center in Second Life, that included recording studios; video screening rooms; audio listening rooms; and an amphitheatre for the taping of broadcasts in front of a live studio audience, who can watch and even ask questions.
On August 3, 2006, LCM produced the first live broadcasts emanating from 3D virtual cyberspace for The Infinite Mind, public radio’s most honored and listened to health and science program. Over four nights, host John Hockenberry interviewed The Infinite Mind’s guests including singer/songwriter Suzanne Vega, the first major musical artist to appear and perform live in avatar form in Second Life; author Kurt Vonnegut, whose writing has chronicled what happens when mankind runs headlong into technology; Howard Rheingold, the futurist who predicted "virtual communities" well before any of us had heard of Microsoft, and John Maeda, of the MIT Media Lab, the famed think tank where they invited the CD-ROM. The interviews became part of three-one hour The Infinite Mind public radio programs, examining "virtual communities."
One of those who saw Suzanne Vega’s "virtual performance" was Mitch Kapor, the chairman of board of directors of Linden Lab, which runs the Second Life platform, and founder of Lotus Development Corporation, and the developer of Lotus 1-2-3.
Kapor says watching Suzanne Vega perform in avatar form was a "spiritual experience," causing him to have a revelation about the potential of the 3D virtual media:
"I had an unexpected spiritual experience two days ago. I was watching on YouTube the video of the Suzanne Vega performance [in Second Life]. What I'm seeing is her avatar, she's playing guitar and there's a live performance going on, I'm hearing it on my headphones because the audio is being streamed, but I'm watching a director cutting between multiple camera angles of a live concert.
I'm watching a kind of television broadcast of an event that is simultaneously real and virtual. And all of a sudden my sense of what was real expanded a millionfold. A fundamental shift of my awareness happened. Where this is going is toward the full interpenetration of the terrestrial reality made up out of atoms, and virtual realities made up out of bits. It's not a separate thing, it's not a cartoon, it's not a game, it's a much, much, much, much unimaginably larger reality, and that is powerful."
Kapor was not alone in his enthusiasm. An August 15, 2006 Wired review about music in Second Life, including Suzanne Vega’s performance, began with the words "Move over, MySpace…" something that likely caught the attention of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which just paid $560 million for the on-line social network site......
....At the same time, we are seeking to work with web developers, marketers, branding experts, leading design artists, and others, from "in world" and real life, to harness the infinite and unbound possibilities of this new, emerging power of 3D virtual reality, to transmit not only information and emotion, but experience, for corporate, non-profit, government and educational institutions. We believe that the virtual 3D experience is so powerful that it has the potential to transform every aspect of culture and society, much as the original arrival of the Internet did. It’s a potential that becomes instantly clear to people, once they experience stepping "through the looking glass."
part of the "The Transmission of Experience"by Bill Lichtenstein
...For the first time, there is a medium that can transmit an experience over the Internet, over a digital cable, to your computer screen. Mind you, experience is not just another sense. Experience is how we learn. It’s what forms and changes our attitudes and behaviors.
The first "platform" as they say in Internet speak, to facilitate the transmission of experience is called Second Life. It’s a web site that allows you to enter into a 3D virtual world, where you literally can go "through the looking glass" of two dimensional imagery and sound, to see, hear and experience anything that can be dreamed up. It’s based on 3D virtual reality technology that powers video games, but Second Life also incorporates a massive virtual community and real working economy that rival many small nations.
In Second Life, you can (as a 3D version of yourself that you create, called an avatar) walk, drive or fly, through thousands of imaginary lands built by the nearly 600,000 current "residents" whose own "avatars" reside there, as well, in virtual form. In Second Life you can experience the streets of Dublin, Ireland, which are so real that if you know your way around the city, you can walk to the Guinness factory, which is operational, and watch the virtual Guinness bottles on the assembly line. Or experience, as many of us did, the pride of watching hundreds of people walk a course that took hours, to raise $30,000 (in real money) for the American Cancer Society. (Those who experienced the cancer walk described a jolt of admiration each time someone passed by wearing a sign that said "cancer survivor," or as we offered our encouragement to someone walking by with a tag that read "lost my mom to breast cancer.")
You can sit out on a deck, listening to a live musical performance with 50 or 60 people, chatting as the sun sets over the water. Or stumble into a disco at 2AM, filled with beautiful people, flirting and dancing to a loud pulsating beat as smoke and stroke lights create a haze in the room. Or experience what it’s like to walk through a haute couture clothing store, buying "one of these" and "one of those" for your avatar to wear.
3D virtual reality involves not only what we can see and hear, but what we can experience, through our real time interaction within this virtual world. And what makes Second Life particularly powerful is that the graphics are deceptively real, allowing them to facilitate and provoke reminiscent and identifiable experiential feelings normally equated with specific real life experiences.
When that happens, when you get a feeling of an experience you know well and have had before, I would call that a "Second Life moment."
Second Life moments are not subjective and personal. More often than not, they are the result of careful visual and audio design. They are also predictable, and measurable, just as the careful design of a roller coaster provokes the shouts and screams of a car full of passengers at just the right spot, in a real life amusement park.
A "Second Life moment" is in fact a neurological response to a visual and audio cue, which for lack of a better word, I would call an "experiant."
An experiant, like a sound wave or a light wave, is the basic piece of sensory information being transmitted to the brain, through the eyes and ears, which, in the case of Second Life, tricks the mind into believing that you are experiencing a virtual event as real.
When you are in Second Life, you may be cognizant that you are in your office or living room, looking at your computer screen. But your brain is processing the input differently.
While in Second Life, you might find yourself sitting on a beach as the waves gentle roll in, or experience the butterflies in your stomach as you skydive hundreds of feet through the clouds.
What makes Second Life particularly powerful is that it has borrowed the best graphic techniques from the video gaming and animation industries. It has also integrated a social factor, involving a real working economy, with some people earning mid-six figures in real money ($US) selling everything from real estate to clothes for avatars to cutting-edge designed virtual furniture to offices and homes. Second Life also features a MySpace.com-like ability to form and maintain connections with people there, including real life friends and as well as those you meet "in world," as they say.
In Second Life, you are also free to just travel throughout the "SL world," as it is called, to experience what the other nearly 600,000 residents have built. You can also purchase your own 16-acre parcel of land, called a "sim," and develop it into whatever you want: a Tibetan shrine, a 1970s disco, a clothing emporium, your college dorm room, or anything you can imagine.
One thing to be noted is that the early years of Second Life, from 2004 to 2006, were focused largely on entertainment and diversion, not unlike the early days of many new media. (Consider, for example, that Edison’s early kinescopes, the forerunners of modern film, focused on the risqué and titillating. This included "The Kiss," a 20-second long short from 1896, which contained a depiction of the first cinematic kiss between a couple, and which became notorious as the first "film production" to be criticized as scandalous, bringing public demands for censorship.)
Likewise, Second Life, not unlike the Internet itself, contains the full range of human and cultural experiences, including a chance to live life on the edge. In-world, as it is called, you can choose to be anything you want, including a different sex or different sexual orientation. You can be tall or short, handsome or beautiful, or strange and fantastic. Young or old. Punk or Goth. Corporate or Fashionista. Experience the world as you would like, white, black or green. And if you can find it in Las Vegas, chances are you can find it in Second Life.
The promise of the medium for social and educational use was also evolving, and in the summer of 2006, Lichtenstein Creative Media, the Peabody Award-winning producers of the national, weekly public radio series, The Infinite Mind, paid for the construction of a 16-acre virtual broadcast center in Second Life, that included recording studios; video screening rooms; audio listening rooms; and an amphitheatre for the taping of broadcasts in front of a live studio audience, who can watch and even ask questions.
On August 3, 2006, LCM produced the first live broadcasts emanating from 3D virtual cyberspace for The Infinite Mind, public radio’s most honored and listened to health and science program. Over four nights, host John Hockenberry interviewed The Infinite Mind’s guests including singer/songwriter Suzanne Vega, the first major musical artist to appear and perform live in avatar form in Second Life; author Kurt Vonnegut, whose writing has chronicled what happens when mankind runs headlong into technology; Howard Rheingold, the futurist who predicted "virtual communities" well before any of us had heard of Microsoft, and John Maeda, of the MIT Media Lab, the famed think tank where they invited the CD-ROM. The interviews became part of three-one hour The Infinite Mind public radio programs, examining "virtual communities."
One of those who saw Suzanne Vega’s "virtual performance" was Mitch Kapor, the chairman of board of directors of Linden Lab, which runs the Second Life platform, and founder of Lotus Development Corporation, and the developer of Lotus 1-2-3.
Kapor says watching Suzanne Vega perform in avatar form was a "spiritual experience," causing him to have a revelation about the potential of the 3D virtual media:
"I had an unexpected spiritual experience two days ago. I was watching on YouTube the video of the Suzanne Vega performance [in Second Life]. What I'm seeing is her avatar, she's playing guitar and there's a live performance going on, I'm hearing it on my headphones because the audio is being streamed, but I'm watching a director cutting between multiple camera angles of a live concert.
I'm watching a kind of television broadcast of an event that is simultaneously real and virtual. And all of a sudden my sense of what was real expanded a millionfold. A fundamental shift of my awareness happened. Where this is going is toward the full interpenetration of the terrestrial reality made up out of atoms, and virtual realities made up out of bits. It's not a separate thing, it's not a cartoon, it's not a game, it's a much, much, much, much unimaginably larger reality, and that is powerful."
Kapor was not alone in his enthusiasm. An August 15, 2006 Wired review about music in Second Life, including Suzanne Vega’s performance, began with the words "Move over, MySpace…" something that likely caught the attention of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which just paid $560 million for the on-line social network site......
....At the same time, we are seeking to work with web developers, marketers, branding experts, leading design artists, and others, from "in world" and real life, to harness the infinite and unbound possibilities of this new, emerging power of 3D virtual reality, to transmit not only information and emotion, but experience, for corporate, non-profit, government and educational institutions. We believe that the virtual 3D experience is so powerful that it has the potential to transform every aspect of culture and society, much as the original arrival of the Internet did. It’s a potential that becomes instantly clear to people, once they experience stepping "through the looking glass."
Is this a real life, is this just fantasy?- Controvesial times online article
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/body_and_soul/article1557980.eceSecond Life is the online world where disabled people can reinvent themselves and enjoy a better life.
Laura Deeley
If you’ve read anything about Second Life, the online virtual world with more than four million residents, you’re probably under the impression that its denizens are society’s oddballs. Geeks, Goths, the lonely and a fair few sexual deviants who, unable to make real friends, congregate online pretending to be someone else from the anonymity of their bedrooms.
Well, it’s true, there is a well-publicised dark side to Second Life. It is probably one of the few places in the world where you will hear of men pretending to be women having virtual sex with women pretending to be unicorns. Second Life has enough sex clubs and brothels to rival Amsterdam’s red-light district. But like any city or country, there is more to Second Life than can be discovered by the casual observer. Unlike in the real world, the residents of Second Life are in full control of their reality. For a few linden dollars (Second Life’s online currency) they can build anything they like. Residents can adjust their physical appearance too; inflate their breasts, lengthen their legs, get body-builder arms or a pert bottom, all without a single nip, tuck, or bicep curl. The result is a world populated mostly by muscular young men and silicone-breasted, wasp-waisted women, accompanied by the odd winged humanoid cat or bald green-skinned dwarf.
But for many of the residents of Second Life, it isn’t having bigger breasts or the ability to fly that inspires them, it’s the simple things that most of us take for granted: walking, running, even talking, are the stuff of their imaginations.
Wilde Cunningham is an avatar controlled by a group of nine adults with cerebral palsy (and their nurse) at the day-care programme they attend in Massachusetts. The group members are aged 30 to 70 and comprise four men and five women. Most of them are wheelchair users and rely on their carers for almost all aspects of their daily lives. Yet in Second Life they have built their own houses, have pets, gardens, even a baseball field. They also have many close friends and a large social network. “Second Life gives me the chance to be the person I feel I was born to be,” says John S, 32, one of the group. “Being in Second Life is how I imagine an innocent man who had been locked up wrongly feels when he is finally set free. In Second Life I get to call the shots.” For John S, the virtual world is all about being free from his disability but for Simon Stevens, who also suffers from cerebral palsy, it is equally about making disabled people visible.
Stevens, 32, lives in Coventry, where he heads Enable Enterprises, a disability consultancy firm. His avatar, Simon Walsh, is in a wheelchair. “I don’t know how to be nondisabled and I’ve never wanted to be nondisabled,” he says. “It’s important that people know; it’s part of who I am, plus I’m a disability consultant in Second Life, too, so I’ve got to look the part.”
Stevens sees Second Life as an opportunity to expand his client base as well as a medium for socialising and forming a community. He will admit that becoming Simon Walsh has had a marked effect on his personal and private life. “As Walsh, I’m smoother, sexier; no beer gut,” he jokes. “In real life I’m very active but speech can be a problem; I wear a helmet because my balance isn’t great; I wear bibs and nappies and I need assistance with most everyday things so, as Walsh, social and romantic relationships are much easier.”
Stevens believe that the internet represents a huge change to the way disability will be dealt with. “This is the future for people with disabilities and the charities that support them,” he enthuses. “Anyone who is disabled should join now: get online, enjoy, explore.”
Nanci Schenkein has done just that. Formerly an events planner from New Jersey, Schenkein was forced to give up her job when, ten years ago, she was told she had multiple sclerosis, which limits her mobility. “I heard about Second Life when it was first opened to the public in 2003. Being a bit of a techie I thought it would be fun to go in and build things.” The first thing she built was a recreation of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. To celebrate, she held a party. Midway through it, it dawned on her that everyone present was more interested in the party than what she had built. “I realised there was a big gap in the market; nobody was doing parties in Second Life, so I got started. Before long people were asking me to do weddings, birthdays and business openings. I never intended to go back to work as an events planner, but I guess it’s what I’m good at.”
Schenkein (avatar: Baccara Rhodes) and her in-world business partner Mash run a Second Life event planning service, Spellbound Events. They also own the virtual equivalent of Selfridges, a huge department store where residents can buy everything from kitchens and cushions to a pet moose.“Second Life provides me with a modest income and a community,” says Schenkein. “People outside don’t seem to understand the connection we have here but it’s so strong. I have friends in Second Life who’ve stayed up with me 24 hours a day when I’ve had to have steroid treatments for the MS — that’s friendship.”
John Lester, the academic programme manager at Linden Lab, the company that owns and runs Second Life, agrees. Lester was the brains behind Brigadoon, a private island built to accommodate a group of people with Asperger’s syndrome, a less severe form of autism, who were already members of a chat site that Lester had developed for people with neurological disorders. People with Asperger’s are often characterised by social isolation and awkwardness, eccentric behaviour and obsessions. Nonverbal communication, such as reading body language and facial expressions, is also difficult.
“The group wanted to socialise and meet people but found it frightening and communicating difficult,” Lester tells me. So he created Brigadoon to provide a place where they could practise socialising in a more realistic setting. The island was a great success. Second Life allows members to chat in realtime so its residents were able to communicate instantly but without the complication of reading nonverbal signals. “It built up everyone’s confidence,” says Lester. “After a while they felt comfortable enough in their social abilities to leave the island and explore the rest of Second Life.”
One such ex-Brigadooner is Torley Wong, who works for Linden Lab as a community developer of communications. Wong, whose Second Life residence is a watermelon house — “when I was a kid I wanted to live in a watermelon” — says his life has changed dramatically since signing up. “Before Second Life I was introverted. I didn’t communicate well.” In Second Life, Wong finds he can communicate through the things he builds and the way he looks, rather than through text. He has a number of different avatars, including a woman called Torley Linden (see panel left) and a dog, which he says represent the different sides of his personality.
With its potential to free you from a body that does not work or a mind that finds it difficult to communicate, Wong says Second Life is the ideal place for people with disabilities. “I’m much happier here. I’m more extroverted and I never want for company,” he smiles, from the comfort of his magical watermelon home.
But are disabled Second Lifers more at risk from online dangers, such as abuse, grooming and scams? Robin Christopherson, of AbilityNet (abilitynet.org.uk), a charity helping disabled adults and children to use computers, believes that as long as disabled users take the same precautions as the nondisabled they will be safe. “Disabled users make up a large proportion of online activity so, proportionally, they are at greater risk, but those risks are the same as for other users,” he says.
The only exception are those people with cognitive or learning disabilities. “Second Life has its own currency and users with cognitive impairments may be more likely to get taken in by scams asking them to part with real money.” However, Christopherson believes that the benefits outweigh the risks. “It’s socially levelling and gives disabled users the chance to escape their disability for a while and the prejudice that can come with it. That’s a positive thing.”
Another concern is that by losing themselves in fantasy, disabled and socially awkward users may not be facing up to their problems. But as John Lester reminds me when I ask if online relationships can ever be a substitute for the real thing: “Behind every avatar a real individual exists; they are achieving real goals and making real friends. It’s all real.”
The relationships built here are long-lasting and often provide support for people when they need it most. Lester believes that this group of people, which society labels misfits, has evolved into a new type of person, comprised of electrons rather than atoms, but with a depth of feeling and concern for one another that we can hope only to replicate in real life.
After meeting and being welcomed in by so many Second Lifers, it is hard to disagree.
What is Second Life?
Second Life is an internet-based virtual world. Its users, known as residents, create an “avatar”, a customised online character who represents their ‘in-world’ self.
Avatars are able to fly, teleport to new locations and ride in vehicles.
There are nearly five million registered residents and up to 30,000 are logged on at any time.
Residents communicate in real time by typing to one another.
Second Life has its own currency known as linden dollars (L$). L$1,000 cost about £2.
Residents can use the linden dollars to buy land and build objects; they can also buy and sell items. To find out more about getting a second life, log on to secondlife.com
Say hello to schizophrenia A Second Life clinic that lets people experience the horrors of schizophrenia could be a useful tool for understanding the disease, says LAURA DEELEY
For a psychiatric unit, the Sacramento Mental Health Centre in California has a strangely deserted feel: no nurses behind the triage desk, no patients wandering the halls and no clutter. As I stroll past reception, I look at a poster advertising a mental health service. As I read, the letters begin to morph and the word “sh**-face” slowly surface. I try to ignore it, hurrying into the next room, where I find a newspaper lying on a table. Only one word is readable — Death — standing out in bold letters. Then things really kick off.
“Kill yourself, you don’t exist, this is all an illusion,” says a disembodied voice to my left. Another voice cuts in, muttering: “Someone sick should be in your bed, we shouldn’t waste beds on a nothing like you.”
It’s all too much. I run down the corridor, throw open a fire door and burst into the sunlight. The voices stop, the world returns to normal, but now I have an idea of what it’s like to spend ten minutes in the mind of a person with schizophrenia. Despite its nightmarish qualities, my experience is an example of the potential of Second Life
Frosty Beam, Laura Deeley’s avatar, gets a taste of life in a schizophrenic world to educate. Created by Professor Peter Yellowlees, a psychiatrist at the University of California, this Second Life clinic is a virtual replica of the unit (with added hallucinations) in which Yellowlees works. “It’s quite an onslaught,” he says, “but it’s one of the best ways we’ve found to help students understand the nature of schizophrenia and what patients suffer daily. Many students struggle with the concept of lived experience; what it’s like to hallucinate, have delusions and hear voices. This tool makes communicating with the person having a schizophrenic episode easier.”
My friend Karen, who has suffered from schizophrenia, tried out the Second Life experience. She says: “This is quite realistic. I think people will understand more from ten minutes in here than you could from talking to someone who is ill or watching a film about it.”
The Second Life clinic is also to be developed into a cognitive tool for patients. “A person’s hallucinations could be programmed into the virtual world in which they then visit their psychiatrist to be taught how to ignore their symptoms,” says Professor Yellowlees.
Laura Deeley
If you’ve read anything about Second Life, the online virtual world with more than four million residents, you’re probably under the impression that its denizens are society’s oddballs. Geeks, Goths, the lonely and a fair few sexual deviants who, unable to make real friends, congregate online pretending to be someone else from the anonymity of their bedrooms.
Well, it’s true, there is a well-publicised dark side to Second Life. It is probably one of the few places in the world where you will hear of men pretending to be women having virtual sex with women pretending to be unicorns. Second Life has enough sex clubs and brothels to rival Amsterdam’s red-light district. But like any city or country, there is more to Second Life than can be discovered by the casual observer. Unlike in the real world, the residents of Second Life are in full control of their reality. For a few linden dollars (Second Life’s online currency) they can build anything they like. Residents can adjust their physical appearance too; inflate their breasts, lengthen their legs, get body-builder arms or a pert bottom, all without a single nip, tuck, or bicep curl. The result is a world populated mostly by muscular young men and silicone-breasted, wasp-waisted women, accompanied by the odd winged humanoid cat or bald green-skinned dwarf.
But for many of the residents of Second Life, it isn’t having bigger breasts or the ability to fly that inspires them, it’s the simple things that most of us take for granted: walking, running, even talking, are the stuff of their imaginations.
Wilde Cunningham is an avatar controlled by a group of nine adults with cerebral palsy (and their nurse) at the day-care programme they attend in Massachusetts. The group members are aged 30 to 70 and comprise four men and five women. Most of them are wheelchair users and rely on their carers for almost all aspects of their daily lives. Yet in Second Life they have built their own houses, have pets, gardens, even a baseball field. They also have many close friends and a large social network. “Second Life gives me the chance to be the person I feel I was born to be,” says John S, 32, one of the group. “Being in Second Life is how I imagine an innocent man who had been locked up wrongly feels when he is finally set free. In Second Life I get to call the shots.” For John S, the virtual world is all about being free from his disability but for Simon Stevens, who also suffers from cerebral palsy, it is equally about making disabled people visible.
Stevens, 32, lives in Coventry, where he heads Enable Enterprises, a disability consultancy firm. His avatar, Simon Walsh, is in a wheelchair. “I don’t know how to be nondisabled and I’ve never wanted to be nondisabled,” he says. “It’s important that people know; it’s part of who I am, plus I’m a disability consultant in Second Life, too, so I’ve got to look the part.”
Stevens sees Second Life as an opportunity to expand his client base as well as a medium for socialising and forming a community. He will admit that becoming Simon Walsh has had a marked effect on his personal and private life. “As Walsh, I’m smoother, sexier; no beer gut,” he jokes. “In real life I’m very active but speech can be a problem; I wear a helmet because my balance isn’t great; I wear bibs and nappies and I need assistance with most everyday things so, as Walsh, social and romantic relationships are much easier.”
Stevens believe that the internet represents a huge change to the way disability will be dealt with. “This is the future for people with disabilities and the charities that support them,” he enthuses. “Anyone who is disabled should join now: get online, enjoy, explore.”
Nanci Schenkein has done just that. Formerly an events planner from New Jersey, Schenkein was forced to give up her job when, ten years ago, she was told she had multiple sclerosis, which limits her mobility. “I heard about Second Life when it was first opened to the public in 2003. Being a bit of a techie I thought it would be fun to go in and build things.” The first thing she built was a recreation of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. To celebrate, she held a party. Midway through it, it dawned on her that everyone present was more interested in the party than what she had built. “I realised there was a big gap in the market; nobody was doing parties in Second Life, so I got started. Before long people were asking me to do weddings, birthdays and business openings. I never intended to go back to work as an events planner, but I guess it’s what I’m good at.”
Schenkein (avatar: Baccara Rhodes) and her in-world business partner Mash run a Second Life event planning service, Spellbound Events. They also own the virtual equivalent of Selfridges, a huge department store where residents can buy everything from kitchens and cushions to a pet moose.“Second Life provides me with a modest income and a community,” says Schenkein. “People outside don’t seem to understand the connection we have here but it’s so strong. I have friends in Second Life who’ve stayed up with me 24 hours a day when I’ve had to have steroid treatments for the MS — that’s friendship.”
John Lester, the academic programme manager at Linden Lab, the company that owns and runs Second Life, agrees. Lester was the brains behind Brigadoon, a private island built to accommodate a group of people with Asperger’s syndrome, a less severe form of autism, who were already members of a chat site that Lester had developed for people with neurological disorders. People with Asperger’s are often characterised by social isolation and awkwardness, eccentric behaviour and obsessions. Nonverbal communication, such as reading body language and facial expressions, is also difficult.
“The group wanted to socialise and meet people but found it frightening and communicating difficult,” Lester tells me. So he created Brigadoon to provide a place where they could practise socialising in a more realistic setting. The island was a great success. Second Life allows members to chat in realtime so its residents were able to communicate instantly but without the complication of reading nonverbal signals. “It built up everyone’s confidence,” says Lester. “After a while they felt comfortable enough in their social abilities to leave the island and explore the rest of Second Life.”
One such ex-Brigadooner is Torley Wong, who works for Linden Lab as a community developer of communications. Wong, whose Second Life residence is a watermelon house — “when I was a kid I wanted to live in a watermelon” — says his life has changed dramatically since signing up. “Before Second Life I was introverted. I didn’t communicate well.” In Second Life, Wong finds he can communicate through the things he builds and the way he looks, rather than through text. He has a number of different avatars, including a woman called Torley Linden (see panel left) and a dog, which he says represent the different sides of his personality.
With its potential to free you from a body that does not work or a mind that finds it difficult to communicate, Wong says Second Life is the ideal place for people with disabilities. “I’m much happier here. I’m more extroverted and I never want for company,” he smiles, from the comfort of his magical watermelon home.
But are disabled Second Lifers more at risk from online dangers, such as abuse, grooming and scams? Robin Christopherson, of AbilityNet (abilitynet.org.uk), a charity helping disabled adults and children to use computers, believes that as long as disabled users take the same precautions as the nondisabled they will be safe. “Disabled users make up a large proportion of online activity so, proportionally, they are at greater risk, but those risks are the same as for other users,” he says.
The only exception are those people with cognitive or learning disabilities. “Second Life has its own currency and users with cognitive impairments may be more likely to get taken in by scams asking them to part with real money.” However, Christopherson believes that the benefits outweigh the risks. “It’s socially levelling and gives disabled users the chance to escape their disability for a while and the prejudice that can come with it. That’s a positive thing.”
Another concern is that by losing themselves in fantasy, disabled and socially awkward users may not be facing up to their problems. But as John Lester reminds me when I ask if online relationships can ever be a substitute for the real thing: “Behind every avatar a real individual exists; they are achieving real goals and making real friends. It’s all real.”
The relationships built here are long-lasting and often provide support for people when they need it most. Lester believes that this group of people, which society labels misfits, has evolved into a new type of person, comprised of electrons rather than atoms, but with a depth of feeling and concern for one another that we can hope only to replicate in real life.
After meeting and being welcomed in by so many Second Lifers, it is hard to disagree.
What is Second Life?
Second Life is an internet-based virtual world. Its users, known as residents, create an “avatar”, a customised online character who represents their ‘in-world’ self.
Avatars are able to fly, teleport to new locations and ride in vehicles.
There are nearly five million registered residents and up to 30,000 are logged on at any time.
Residents communicate in real time by typing to one another.
Second Life has its own currency known as linden dollars (L$). L$1,000 cost about £2.
Residents can use the linden dollars to buy land and build objects; they can also buy and sell items. To find out more about getting a second life, log on to secondlife.com
Say hello to schizophrenia A Second Life clinic that lets people experience the horrors of schizophrenia could be a useful tool for understanding the disease, says LAURA DEELEY
For a psychiatric unit, the Sacramento Mental Health Centre in California has a strangely deserted feel: no nurses behind the triage desk, no patients wandering the halls and no clutter. As I stroll past reception, I look at a poster advertising a mental health service. As I read, the letters begin to morph and the word “sh**-face” slowly surface. I try to ignore it, hurrying into the next room, where I find a newspaper lying on a table. Only one word is readable — Death — standing out in bold letters. Then things really kick off.
“Kill yourself, you don’t exist, this is all an illusion,” says a disembodied voice to my left. Another voice cuts in, muttering: “Someone sick should be in your bed, we shouldn’t waste beds on a nothing like you.”
It’s all too much. I run down the corridor, throw open a fire door and burst into the sunlight. The voices stop, the world returns to normal, but now I have an idea of what it’s like to spend ten minutes in the mind of a person with schizophrenia. Despite its nightmarish qualities, my experience is an example of the potential of Second Life
Frosty Beam, Laura Deeley’s avatar, gets a taste of life in a schizophrenic world to educate. Created by Professor Peter Yellowlees, a psychiatrist at the University of California, this Second Life clinic is a virtual replica of the unit (with added hallucinations) in which Yellowlees works. “It’s quite an onslaught,” he says, “but it’s one of the best ways we’ve found to help students understand the nature of schizophrenia and what patients suffer daily. Many students struggle with the concept of lived experience; what it’s like to hallucinate, have delusions and hear voices. This tool makes communicating with the person having a schizophrenic episode easier.”
My friend Karen, who has suffered from schizophrenia, tried out the Second Life experience. She says: “This is quite realistic. I think people will understand more from ten minutes in here than you could from talking to someone who is ill or watching a film about it.”
The Second Life clinic is also to be developed into a cognitive tool for patients. “A person’s hallucinations could be programmed into the virtual world in which they then visit their psychiatrist to be taught how to ignore their symptoms,” says Professor Yellowlees.
Interesting quote that sum's up the idea of experiencing a better life in SL
'...when so many are at a loss for where to find their mountaintops, this offers an expedition into peaks and valleys, without all the fear of losing (so many things), even if this fear is just of spending beyond our expendible means; all the negativity that we often associate with the internet is rendered inconsequential in this field of unlimited potential, where unrestricted creativity is located in its rightful place within the reach of beatific and wonderous human imagination; any hope is granted a divine and righteuos right to exist within in our sometimes hopeless world'
Get a first life in the second one
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/career_and_jobs/article1673182.ece
As more people spend time in online environments, businesses are now beginning to tackle the virtual world
Carol Lewis
The obvious response to anyone who spends very long in the virtual world is to tell them to get a life but if they are visiting Second Life they may already have a more interesting one than you suppose.
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world inhabited by more than five million users. The currency is Linden dollars, named after Second Life’s creators Linden Laboratories and users’ virtual beings are called avatars. It is, quite literally, another world.
It’s not just for geeks though: corporations are increasingly looking at how they can benefit from merging real and virtual worlds. And one of the key areas in which Second Life is creating excitment is recruitment. Yell, the Yellow Pages company, is among those exploring the potential of Second Life. It has posted T-shirted career advisers in the virtual world. The career adviser avatars chat to residents and answer questions about working at Yell. There are also four yellow telepone-style boxes strategically placed around Second Life where users can access the company’s careers website. Isobel Hung, head of national resourcing at Yell UK, says: “We are not trying to increase the number of applicants for jobs. We’re seizing the opportunity to reach people we wouldn’t normally be able to and raise awareness about Yell. The kind of people who are using Second Life may have just the right blend of creativity and innovation that we’re looking for in our future talent.”
It’s not just the candidates who are cutting-edge. David Coombs, regional head of digital at the recruitment marketing company TMP World-wide, says: “Companies that want to be seen as cutting edge and want to be associated with the technology are getting involved in Second Life recruitment initiatives.”
TMP has built an island in Second Life where it will host recruitment fairs and events it is organising its first fair for six large US IT and telecommunications companies. The invitation-only event will include opportunities to tour replica offices, talk to employees, download information and attend presentations, initial interviews and assessment centres. “You can literally show a candidate the company they might work for right down to where the toilets and watercoolers are. They can meet and talk to employees. It is a really engaging, powerful tool,” he says.
The management consultancy Bain & Company agrees. It recently invited MBA students from US business schools who had applied for internships to a recruitment event with senior Bain staff in Second Life. The company has built a virtual recruitment centre complete with networking areas, auditorium and information stands where visitors can watch videos and slide shows and download information.
Bill Neuenfeldt, head of Bain’s global schools recruiting programme, says: “Feed-back has been great. The next step is to expand the type of events we use this wonderful venue for.” Events could include global staff meetings, seminars and workshops. This is a route that the IT consultancy IBM has already taken aside from recruitment events it holds senior staff meetings and corporate hospitality events in Second Life.
But will we lose the ability to interact face-to-face and is networking really networking without real world drinks and canapés? Neuenfeldt says that personal communication skills will always be important to client-orientated businesses. “It is a wonderful way to enhance the [recruitment] process but I don’t think it will ever replace personal interaction and meetings.” Coombs agrees: “We still need to see [people’s] body language and read their faces.”
So it probably pays not to be too fanciful when designing your avatar.
As more people spend time in online environments, businesses are now beginning to tackle the virtual world
Carol Lewis
The obvious response to anyone who spends very long in the virtual world is to tell them to get a life but if they are visiting Second Life they may already have a more interesting one than you suppose.
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world inhabited by more than five million users. The currency is Linden dollars, named after Second Life’s creators Linden Laboratories and users’ virtual beings are called avatars. It is, quite literally, another world.
It’s not just for geeks though: corporations are increasingly looking at how they can benefit from merging real and virtual worlds. And one of the key areas in which Second Life is creating excitment is recruitment. Yell, the Yellow Pages company, is among those exploring the potential of Second Life. It has posted T-shirted career advisers in the virtual world. The career adviser avatars chat to residents and answer questions about working at Yell. There are also four yellow telepone-style boxes strategically placed around Second Life where users can access the company’s careers website. Isobel Hung, head of national resourcing at Yell UK, says: “We are not trying to increase the number of applicants for jobs. We’re seizing the opportunity to reach people we wouldn’t normally be able to and raise awareness about Yell. The kind of people who are using Second Life may have just the right blend of creativity and innovation that we’re looking for in our future talent.”
It’s not just the candidates who are cutting-edge. David Coombs, regional head of digital at the recruitment marketing company TMP World-wide, says: “Companies that want to be seen as cutting edge and want to be associated with the technology are getting involved in Second Life recruitment initiatives.”
TMP has built an island in Second Life where it will host recruitment fairs and events it is organising its first fair for six large US IT and telecommunications companies. The invitation-only event will include opportunities to tour replica offices, talk to employees, download information and attend presentations, initial interviews and assessment centres. “You can literally show a candidate the company they might work for right down to where the toilets and watercoolers are. They can meet and talk to employees. It is a really engaging, powerful tool,” he says.
The management consultancy Bain & Company agrees. It recently invited MBA students from US business schools who had applied for internships to a recruitment event with senior Bain staff in Second Life. The company has built a virtual recruitment centre complete with networking areas, auditorium and information stands where visitors can watch videos and slide shows and download information.
Bill Neuenfeldt, head of Bain’s global schools recruiting programme, says: “Feed-back has been great. The next step is to expand the type of events we use this wonderful venue for.” Events could include global staff meetings, seminars and workshops. This is a route that the IT consultancy IBM has already taken aside from recruitment events it holds senior staff meetings and corporate hospitality events in Second Life.
But will we lose the ability to interact face-to-face and is networking really networking without real world drinks and canapés? Neuenfeldt says that personal communication skills will always be important to client-orientated businesses. “It is a wonderful way to enhance the [recruitment] process but I don’t think it will ever replace personal interaction and meetings.” Coombs agrees: “We still need to see [people’s] body language and read their faces.”
So it probably pays not to be too fanciful when designing your avatar.
CNN: Experts say the use of virtual worlds like Second Life may be widespread by 2020
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/08/07/virtual.living/index.html
LONDON, England (CNN) -- It's 2020. You get home from work, kick off your shoes and relax -- on your very own tropical island. That night, your friends teleport over with other glamorous guests, all nipped, tucked and primped to perfection, for a hedonistic cocktail party at your five-star beach house, decked out in expensively understated chrome, crystal and fine Italian furniture.
But this is no billionaire way of life. If virtual worlds become the next Facebook phenomenon, experts predict that logging on to a luxury lifestyle could be attainable for all of us -- and we might even spend more money on our online homes than on our real-life surroundings.
With over 30 million users worldwide, 8.5 million photos uploaded each day and 15 billion page views a month, Facebook is undoubtedly the Internet's flavor of the month. But by 2020, virtual worlds may have surpassed social networking sites as the place to spend time online. Experts believe that the draw of 3-D spaces where our avatars can hang out with our friends -- and meet new ones -- may tempt away even the most ardent Facebook addict.
David Knighton, a 35-year-old Second Life user from Jacksonville, Florida, is one of many netizens exploring virtual worlds. He's been visiting the site for over a year and told CNN that he enjoys its social dimension. "I've met several good friends in Second Life, who are still friends to this day in the 'real world'" he said.
At times, David has spent six hours a day, seven days a week on Second Life. But what is the draw of a virtual world? Are they only attractive to tech-heads? David doesn't think so. He says, "Experience plays a role in acceptance to be sure, but Second Life takes hold more on a social and creative level. Someone who signs in and recognizes those aspects of Second Life will immediately be hooked."
Don't Miss
Just Imagine: 2020
The future of living space
Metaverse Roadmap
This is backed up by blogger and writer Caleb Booker, who has tracked virtual worlds from phone "party lines" through the first one-player text-based computer adventures to the two- and three-dimensional Internet worlds that are burgeoning today.
Booker believes that, in a society that's increasingly mobile, virtual worlds help us hold our far-flung social networks together. He cites the example of his mother-in-law, who recently moved to a new city and uses Facebook to stay in touch with her three daughters. "They're all busy, so virtual world technologies and Web 2.0 apps are the best and most convenient ways to keep up," he told CNN.
Booker says that virtual worlds take this interaction to a more sophisticated level. "I don't even have to worry about cab fare if I want to have a little get-together with my friends from the UK and the US tonight," he said.
And he thinks that it's only a matter of time before virtual worlds follow Facebook and explode in popularity. "Bottom line: if people are using email for social interaction, they'll probably be interested in other ways to be social online."
Life-like avatars
Interaction on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites is mainly limited to text, with the ability for users to add photos and video. But in a virtual world, people are represented by avatars: computer-generated figures which can look uncannily like ourselves -- if we choose. They can walk like us, they'll soon talk like us and they can interact with each other.
As 3-D technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, Booker says that photo-realistic avatars are just around the corner, and will become increasingly convincing.
"Eye movement, breathing, and realistic expressions will be the easy part," he revealed. "The hard part will come with things like synching mouth movements with voice recognition. That's something we might not quite have nailed by 2020, but there will definitely be some kind of engine that attempts it by then."
Holographic projections of 3-D objects are in development, but it will be some time before virtual reality offers us experiences akin to Star Trek's holodecks: touching and tasting virtual matter is still some way off.
"We're a long, long way away from having a completely immersive Matrix-like world," he told CNN. "But then again, technology can surprise you. I remember joking with a friend about a guy who bought a brand-new VGA monitor. It could display 256 colors at once -- who could honestly need something like that?"
Spartan life offline, exotic life online
The authors of the "Metaverse Roadmap," a briefing document that explores the possible development of virtual worlds over the next 20 years, agree that a boom within a decade is likely. Their research has indicated that by 2016, half of us will have interactive avatars, with those aged between 13 and 30 spending around 10 hours a week socializing in 3-D visual environments.
And the draw of virtual worlds may encourage some of us to forsake our mundane real-life surroundings for a luxury life online.
The Metaverse Roadmap points to the millions of youths who already use worlds like Habbo Hotel and Playdo, and suggests that "Youth raised in such conditions might live increasingly Spartan lives in the physical world, and rich, exotic lives in virtual space." It makes a certain kind of sense: why cripple yourself with huge mortgage payments on "real" real-estate when on Second Life you can buy an entire island for $1,600 and $300/month maintenance?
The uses for virtual worlds don't stop at socializing. Virtual environments are already being built for education, like Edward Castronova's "Arden" project at Indiana University, which will transport users into a Shakespearean world. The applications for interior designers are clear, while a team at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland have used the virtual shoot-em-up "Duke Nukem" to diagnose depression in players.
Business collaboration
Booker believes that virtual worlds will be used increasingly as business tools. "They're very well suited to collaborative work," he explained. "We're not sure why yet, but there's something about seeing everybody's avatar in the room with yours that makes the whole experience far more effective than if you were to simply have a conference call. It creates a real shared experience."
And with the launch of Sony's PlayStation Home -- an online world for the games console -- this autumn, it seems the big players in the entertainment world are banking on virtual realms being part of the future, too.
"The common feeling is that by 2020 virtual worlds will be as widespread as the World Wide Web is now," states Booker.
With that popularity comes opportunity -- and not only for Internet land barons like self-proclaimed Second Life millionaire Anshe Chung, but also virtual builders, landscapers and interior decorators, designers of avatar clothing and accessories, and even community moderators and governors. "A significant percentage of the world's population will be able to make a living working in virtual worlds," says Booker.
And he thinks that this potential is just around the corner. "The truth is that, as far as virtual worlds go, we're living in the flash point at the beginning of the explosion."
LONDON, England (CNN) -- It's 2020. You get home from work, kick off your shoes and relax -- on your very own tropical island. That night, your friends teleport over with other glamorous guests, all nipped, tucked and primped to perfection, for a hedonistic cocktail party at your five-star beach house, decked out in expensively understated chrome, crystal and fine Italian furniture.
But this is no billionaire way of life. If virtual worlds become the next Facebook phenomenon, experts predict that logging on to a luxury lifestyle could be attainable for all of us -- and we might even spend more money on our online homes than on our real-life surroundings.
With over 30 million users worldwide, 8.5 million photos uploaded each day and 15 billion page views a month, Facebook is undoubtedly the Internet's flavor of the month. But by 2020, virtual worlds may have surpassed social networking sites as the place to spend time online. Experts believe that the draw of 3-D spaces where our avatars can hang out with our friends -- and meet new ones -- may tempt away even the most ardent Facebook addict.
David Knighton, a 35-year-old Second Life user from Jacksonville, Florida, is one of many netizens exploring virtual worlds. He's been visiting the site for over a year and told CNN that he enjoys its social dimension. "I've met several good friends in Second Life, who are still friends to this day in the 'real world'" he said.
At times, David has spent six hours a day, seven days a week on Second Life. But what is the draw of a virtual world? Are they only attractive to tech-heads? David doesn't think so. He says, "Experience plays a role in acceptance to be sure, but Second Life takes hold more on a social and creative level. Someone who signs in and recognizes those aspects of Second Life will immediately be hooked."
Don't Miss
Just Imagine: 2020
The future of living space
Metaverse Roadmap
This is backed up by blogger and writer Caleb Booker, who has tracked virtual worlds from phone "party lines" through the first one-player text-based computer adventures to the two- and three-dimensional Internet worlds that are burgeoning today.
Booker believes that, in a society that's increasingly mobile, virtual worlds help us hold our far-flung social networks together. He cites the example of his mother-in-law, who recently moved to a new city and uses Facebook to stay in touch with her three daughters. "They're all busy, so virtual world technologies and Web 2.0 apps are the best and most convenient ways to keep up," he told CNN.
Booker says that virtual worlds take this interaction to a more sophisticated level. "I don't even have to worry about cab fare if I want to have a little get-together with my friends from the UK and the US tonight," he said.
And he thinks that it's only a matter of time before virtual worlds follow Facebook and explode in popularity. "Bottom line: if people are using email for social interaction, they'll probably be interested in other ways to be social online."
Life-like avatars
Interaction on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites is mainly limited to text, with the ability for users to add photos and video. But in a virtual world, people are represented by avatars: computer-generated figures which can look uncannily like ourselves -- if we choose. They can walk like us, they'll soon talk like us and they can interact with each other.
As 3-D technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, Booker says that photo-realistic avatars are just around the corner, and will become increasingly convincing.
"Eye movement, breathing, and realistic expressions will be the easy part," he revealed. "The hard part will come with things like synching mouth movements with voice recognition. That's something we might not quite have nailed by 2020, but there will definitely be some kind of engine that attempts it by then."
Holographic projections of 3-D objects are in development, but it will be some time before virtual reality offers us experiences akin to Star Trek's holodecks: touching and tasting virtual matter is still some way off.
"We're a long, long way away from having a completely immersive Matrix-like world," he told CNN. "But then again, technology can surprise you. I remember joking with a friend about a guy who bought a brand-new VGA monitor. It could display 256 colors at once -- who could honestly need something like that?"
Spartan life offline, exotic life online
The authors of the "Metaverse Roadmap," a briefing document that explores the possible development of virtual worlds over the next 20 years, agree that a boom within a decade is likely. Their research has indicated that by 2016, half of us will have interactive avatars, with those aged between 13 and 30 spending around 10 hours a week socializing in 3-D visual environments.
And the draw of virtual worlds may encourage some of us to forsake our mundane real-life surroundings for a luxury life online.
The Metaverse Roadmap points to the millions of youths who already use worlds like Habbo Hotel and Playdo, and suggests that "Youth raised in such conditions might live increasingly Spartan lives in the physical world, and rich, exotic lives in virtual space." It makes a certain kind of sense: why cripple yourself with huge mortgage payments on "real" real-estate when on Second Life you can buy an entire island for $1,600 and $300/month maintenance?
The uses for virtual worlds don't stop at socializing. Virtual environments are already being built for education, like Edward Castronova's "Arden" project at Indiana University, which will transport users into a Shakespearean world. The applications for interior designers are clear, while a team at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland have used the virtual shoot-em-up "Duke Nukem" to diagnose depression in players.
Business collaboration
Booker believes that virtual worlds will be used increasingly as business tools. "They're very well suited to collaborative work," he explained. "We're not sure why yet, but there's something about seeing everybody's avatar in the room with yours that makes the whole experience far more effective than if you were to simply have a conference call. It creates a real shared experience."
And with the launch of Sony's PlayStation Home -- an online world for the games console -- this autumn, it seems the big players in the entertainment world are banking on virtual realms being part of the future, too.
"The common feeling is that by 2020 virtual worlds will be as widespread as the World Wide Web is now," states Booker.
With that popularity comes opportunity -- and not only for Internet land barons like self-proclaimed Second Life millionaire Anshe Chung, but also virtual builders, landscapers and interior decorators, designers of avatar clothing and accessories, and even community moderators and governors. "A significant percentage of the world's population will be able to make a living working in virtual worlds," says Booker.
And he thinks that this potential is just around the corner. "The truth is that, as far as virtual worlds go, we're living in the flash point at the beginning of the explosion."
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