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."