[extropy-chat] Re: Any Second Life users?

Giu1i0 Pri5c0 pgptag at gmail.com
Sat Dec 17 06:44:58 UTC 2005


I will continue here my report on VR walks in Second
Life<http://secondlife.com/>.
There are tools to build your avatar, but I am not likely to find the time
to go through a trial and error learning curve and build a good avatar. So I
purchased a prefab avatar who looks like a senior citizen. This makes sense
because I am probably quite older than most SL residents. I don't want to
look like a superhero or anything different from a normal early 21st century
human (of course your SL avatar can look like whatever you like), but I wish
to have an avatar who looke like me.
Then I purchased my first land in the snowy part of the main island. I
bought a small cottage that will be my permanent home in SL.
This Fox News article <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,173728,00.html>has
a video which shows some Second Life features and Linden Lab's CEO Philip
Rosendale.
One of the most interesting things happening in Second Life is the
project Democracy
Island <http://dotank.nyls.edu/DemocracyIsland.html>, described also
in the Second
Life Future Salon blog
<http://slfuturesalon.blogs.com/second_life_future_salon/2005/11/democracy_islan.html>and
this Information Week article
<http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=173601081>.
I was told of Democracy Island by one of the first residents I met there ( Lyre
Calliope<http://slfuturesalon.blogs.com/second_life_future_salon/2005/08/second_life_fut.html>
).
Democracy Island is a "* Virtual world environment to offer government
entities and interest groups an on-line space for conducting citizen
consultation. In short, this project will use the metaphor of the "county
fair," a familiar civic event in the life of a community. This will be a
place - like a meeting tent, a town hall or even a shopping mall - where
groups can congregate online. The aim of this project is to design a space
where interested parties, such as trade associations, activist groups and
scientific experts, will be able to set up virtual booths for presentation
of information and deliberation as well as advocacy *". The project is run
by the New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy and
has been funded by the International Center for Automated Information
Research.
Unfortunately I missed the SL Future Salon
meeting<http://slfuturesalon.blogs.com/second_life_future_salon/2005/12/future_salon_w_.html>I
wished to attend. 5:30 PM PST is really the worse possible time for
Europeans. I look forward to attending one of the next SL Future Salon
meetings if one is scheduled at a more suitable time.
I have heard many comments that the SL system should be improved and do
[this and that]. I am sure if there are common requirements for new features
they will be implemented in SL or perhaps in another VR world. But I think
SL is the first example of "real VR" world, in the sense that it is rich and
realistic enough to attract a large user base and to permit experimenting
with how people interact with each other in VR worlds, and how VR worlds
interact with the real one (for example the emergence of real economies
around virtual economies as it is beginning to happen in SL).
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