Get a (Second) Life!

Making It Real

The social aspect of SL has obvious and not-so-obvious connections with the real world. There is the story of two avatars who became friends in SL and had never met in RL until his RL home was destroyed by hurricane Katrina, and she let him stay in her RL home for months. There are the weddings and romances and collaborations, but you've heard those stories about the Web as well.

The various payment plans and the ability to trade Linden dollars, the wars and insurrections and terrorist attacks, the clubs and events and towns and collaborative building projects are in effect experiments in economics and politics and sociology and group dynamics. Some of this ferment is driven by fiat decisions by Linden and some is instigated by residents; but either way, it makes SL a laboratory for trying out new ways to live together.

It's also in the SL activity of building things that SL bleeds out into RL. One such SL-RL link is prototyping. Necessity is the mother of invention and creativity is the child of constraint. Changes in the infrastructure technology, scripting language, and LL business model over the years have imposed different constraints that transformed SL from one kind of sandbox to another.

You can use SL and LSL to prototype software, trying out user interface ideas in 3D or 2D, exploring immersive environment behavior, testing distributed computing paradigms. Some would fault SL development for the emphasis on 3D, but even granting that 3D is a distraction, a resource hog, a design bear, an awkward user interface, and a constraint on imagination (why impose the constraints of RL on a virtual world?), it has its uses, as in the prototyping of RL objects. One LSL coder worked up a new kitchen for his house in LSL after having tried and rejected more conventional design tools. And when he was done, he extracted parameters from his SL objects and sent them to suppliers and implemented his SL kitchen in his RL home. The virtue of prototyping a room in a virtual world like SL is that you can then move your avatar around in the room, getting a 3D feel for the aesthetics and traffic flow and convenience, even invite people in to get their impressions. If, on top of that, you could write or buy a script that extracts all the parameters that suppliers and contractors needed to build the room—or to take it a step further, extract the parameters that need to be fed to automated tools to produce the components of the RL room—then the benefits start to get real.

The last parts of that scenario are as yet only imagined, but that's what makes SL so interesting: It's a great environment for imagining and for trying out what you've imagined. We're going to do that. Maybe we'll see you there. Preferably without bombs, but whatever.