BBC and virtual worlds

.....picked up from BBC today. I guess it is official about Cory.......A very real future for virtual worlds
Second Life has long been seen as the bell-wether for the growing interest in virtual spaces. Here, founder Philip Rosedale talks to the BBC News website about the past and future of the parallel world he is helping to create.

These are interesting times for Second Life. In the four short years it has existed, it has seen media coverage go from hysterical to hectoring. It has been hailed as both a harbinger of the next big thing and a brake on the burgeoning development of virtual worlds.

Speculation about its future has intensified as news emerged that chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka, who helped design and build Second Life, has left the company.

But said Philip Rosedale, one of the founders of Linden Lab which oversees the running of Second Life, the departure will not dent the vision all the original engineers had for their creation.

"Cory is a fantastic guy, he's fantastically capable and we will miss him a lot," said Mr Rosedale.


Philip Rosedale and his Second Life avatar Philip Linden
"Our differences are more about how to run the company and how best we organise ourselves as a company going forward," he said. "We really do not have any differences in strategic direction."

"There's not a shift in direction in the company that I wanted to make or Cory wanted to make that was incompatible," he told the BBC News website.

"We are a core of technologists in our heart," he said. "The first 10 people that joined, there are only two that have left, they are all engineers."

For the near future, Linden Lab is looking at ways of making the technology behind Second Life much more open and easy to use.

Web worlds

"We are still in the early days so the things that are wrong are still wrong," he said, "It is still hard to figure out how to use Second Life and how to find things."

In many respects, he said, online virtual worlds are at the point now that the web reached in the early 1990s.

"We have often had fun in the office finding quotes from the early 90s that map exactly to what they say about Second Life now, " he said, "that it's disorganised, you cannot find anything and there is a lot of crap."


Despite the scepticism from many quarters he is fervently convinced that virtual worlds are the future of online life.

"Virtual worlds are inherently comprehensible to us in a way that the web is not," said Mr Rosedale. "They look like the world we already know and take advantage of our ability to remember and organise."

"Information is presented there in a way that matches our memories and experiences," he said. "Your and my ability to remember the words we use and the information we talk about is much higher if it's presented as a room or space around us."

Equally important, he said, was the visibility or presence that being in a virtual world bestows on its users.

By contrast, he said, when visiting a website people are anonymous and invisible.

Shopping on Amazon might be much easier and enjoyable if you could turn to one of the other 10,000 or so people on the site at the same time as you and ask about what they were buying, get recommendations and swap good or bad experiences.


Many firms are using Second Life to collaborate
Many firms and educators were starting to use Second Life as an online collaboration space that helps them work together like they do in the real world but to which is added the malleability of a wholly digital space.

For virtual worlds to be able to extend this usefulness to the mass of people a lot of work has yet to be done, said Mr Rosedale.

What it might take, he said, was software that would let people browse virtual worlds like they do webpages. Built in to that software would be an identity management system that re-drew yourself to match those different spaces.

"I think it is going to happen, that kind of portability of identity is important but I could not hazard a guess right now about how quickly it will happen," he said.

"But," he said, "with a sufficiently open platform then people will move into it quite rapidly."

It might, he speculated, one day outstrip the web as a means for people to communicate and work together.

"Because virtual worlds like Second Life do not impose language barriers like the web does - that almost certainly means their ultimate utility range is larger," he said. "We are at the very early stages of something very big."

Pick-pockets, Phone-calls and sex ed?

Hail, second lifers!!
Your Intrepid librarian has been combing the web looking for new and tasty tid-bits to pass along and she thinks she may have a few to share.
First I would like to report that the new windlight viewer is absolutly stunning and I spent the first three nights on my roof just watching the sun rise and fall. So if you haven't seen it yet by all means go download it!!

Second Life Residents To Get Calls From The Real World
Avatars will be able to sign up for phone numbers and get phone calls from the physical plane -- one of a series of new voice and chat upgrades planned for the virtual world.

By Mitch Wagner
InformationWeek
December 7, 2007 09:20 AM


Linden Lab is working on upgrades for voice communications in Second Life, including the ability for avatars in-world to receive phone calls from people in the real world, as well as Linux support and moderator controls.


Linden Lab is also working on a standalone desktop client for chat.


In the first quarter of 2008, users in Second Life will be able to get real-world phone numbers assigned to their avatars, and receive calls from real-world phones, said Joe Miller, vice president, platform & technology development for Linden Lab. Users will be able to get voicemail, which can be e-mailed to the user or listened to when in-world........(read more)

click.......Herbert....you on that second life again?.......well we need you down at the office......I had a feeling that call in sick thing was fake.....

Academic to host sex ed class on Second Life

Anthea Lipsett
Thursday December 6, 2007
EducationGuardian.co.uk


A senior Salford University academic is to venture on to the social networking site Second Life to bring sex education to teenagers online.
The move follows Tuesday's Youth Parliament report that criticised the poor quality of sex education being given to teenagers in UK schools.

Barbara Hastings-Asatourian, a senior nursing lecturer at Salford and managing director of Contraception Education, will host the first live seminar on sexual health on Second Life next week.....(read more)