Sunfleet

Siggraph 06: Collaboration, Virtual Worlds & Second Life

Continuing on the theme of "interesting things at SIGGRAPH" .... I attended an Exhibitor Tech Talk on the topic of collaboration and Second Life. There were several presenters from Linden Lab, the creators of the Second Life. (One of the presenters was Pathfinder Linden. Here are his P*werP*int slides.)

I won't give a description of Second Life here, either because you know about it already or you don't care, but I will list out what I found to be most interesting. This is coming from the perspective of someone who does not play multi-player games but is very interested in making collaboration and communication effortless.

• Everything you create in the world, you own. So this leads to monetary exchange of the items/objects people have spent a lot of time creating. This also implies, even without any monetary exchange, that the time you spend creating something is not "lost" time, but rather went towards creating something valuable. (I am guessing this is one of the main reasons why the game is so popular.)
• The main thing to do in Second Life (it seemed) is to build things. And when you build things, people can see you doing it within the world, so it becomes an inherently social activity. Or at least an activity that involves social awareness. Since you want to build things and you can see other people building things, it seems like a great place to learn from other people.
• Second Life supports live streaming of video, so real-world (non-virtual? what is "real" anymore?) events can be shown within Second Life. This can lead to crazy things like within Second Life's replica of Harvard's Berkman Center you can see live presentations that are going on at the physical Berkman Center at that moment. Or you (as an avatar) could look at yourself giving a presentation in real-life from within Second Life. Freaky! And also very interesting for workplace collaboration scenarios with a mix of collocated and remote workers.
• A point that was never mentioned: there is no audio in Second Life. So all communication is basic text chat (I'm assuming). Could it possibly be as bad as it sounds??

As a side note, the presentations by Linden Lab employees included a few too many examples of overly-sexualized female avatars for my taste. To counterbalance that, I am providing here a picture of a demo going on elsewhere at Siggraph that involved gratuitous objectification of the male body.

Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Social Tools"  |