Forget expanding Dubai, forget sprawling Las Vegas, forget the mushrooming skyscrapers of Shanghai. There’s a city state which, at just five years old, has enjoyed such turbocharged growth that its square mileage already dwarfs New York. Not bad for a place that doesn’t exist.

Second Life is a virtual world that lives only on the worldwide web. Sitting at their real-life PCs, its users pilot a digital character, or avatar, around a 3D simulation of the real world. It even has its own economy in which people design virtual items such as clothes, jewellery or furniture, or buy and develop land, then sell to other users in Linden dollars, which can be converted to real money. There are around 55,000 people making money from Second Life, a few of them millionaires, but there are con artists and fraudsters too.

This Matrix-like world was the childhood dream of Philip Rosedale, the 39-year-old founder of Linden Lab, the San Francisco-based company which plays god by running it all. His not inconsiderable ambitions including redefining the entire web and helping to save the planet by reducing the need for business air travel.

When he’s asked how big Second Life is now, Rosedale doesn’t miss a beat: ‘Four hundred and sixty-two square miles. The land mass, which is growing at 5 per cent a month, is so big now that if you had a helicopter and flew around the edge of the island, so to speak, it would be expanding too fast to really figure out what was going on.’

Audio: The Observer’s David Smith interviews Second Life creator Philip Rosedale

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Yesterday, at 14.30 SLT, was a very interesting friendly soccer game between nationals teams of Romania and Portugal. Match was playing on a very close to real football field, between the best players from each country. Mutu, Lobont, Chivu or Figo, Cristiano Ronaldo was not there, but SL national players of each team try to defend in the best way they can, the honor of their countries. Fans was there too, supporting their favorite teams. Sometimes much louder then SL sim supported and because of their flags and louder encouragements, the match was almost stopped because of lag. But until the end all was going well, and all people present on the event have a lot of fun and a great soccer show to watch.

Here are the teams who fight on the green field in the name of their country:

Romania: gi0vanni Munro (Goalkeeper), Cyndee Shepherd, Tzunny Nagy, nutzu Parx, Javier Pastorelli, leading Maximus, Catalin Gothly, Radu Lubitsch (cpt.)

Portugal: felicemagnini Babii (Goalkeeper), Trane Mornington, Limalhas Farella (cpt), Capelas Mighty, djandr Smit, Bernard Dominquez, Telmo Laval, goncalo Johin

Final score was 14-0 for Romania team, but Portugal team fights hard in the game too, maybe their lack of more practice cause them to can’t score even they have some nice opportunities too. Anyway important was friendship between players, fans and people watching the show, and we hope we will see much more great games like this in Second Life football fields.

by Cyb3rk Bade

If you’re looking for an exotic place to spend some time alone or with someone special Mexico is definitely a place to see. Besides the beautiful architecture, it’s a very strong archeology sim reflecting the history of Mexico from its roots to today’s looks. It represents strongly tradition through it’s colors and textures specific to Mexico and also the earth formation with hills, tropical forest, lake, sea with the reef, ruins and pyramids.

You’ll find a traditional shop with various specific things where you can do a little shopping for your own house to take it as souvenir just like if you went to visit a foreign place. You’ll find dwellings from history pages to modern houses and beautiful ruins. If you just want to hang out in a quiet place there is the beach where you can watch a beautiful sunset. If you feel like dancing you’ll find a very traditional dance arena or enjoy a beautiful walk through the forest under the serene sounds of the tropics. If you like horseback riding you can find a horse ranch where you can take a horse for a ride on the beach. You can just seat on a blanket by the waterfall next to the fire and watch the beautiful sunset that is reflecting into the magnificent architecture. If you love to swim you can enjoy the reef and swim with the fishes. Or if you take a walk through the forest on a tiny trail you’ll get to a beautiful lake and at the bottom of the lake you’ll find archeological evidence from ancient times proving that Mexico has deep roots in history. If you love to look at things from above you can go hang lighting and just explore the island from the air. And something even more fun is a harness on a rope that you can just sit in and it will take you on a ride to the next tree. You really get to enjoy lots of things here.

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Many times when we use a PC we have to move or copy a folder or a file to another place. I am sure most of you already know how to do this, but like we all was sometime ago, are few of us who are just started in all this computer stuff and maybe need to know about this too. This is the same in Second Life when you have to move or copy some items in your inventory from one place to other, or you just need to edit some notecards and do same operations with a word or a sentence. How we do this?

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The Associated Press

You can always spot the novices in the virtual reality world of Second Life: their online characters — or avatars — stumble around awkwardly and walk into objects, as their real-world users fumble with the keyboard controls.

Now, technology from Japan could help make navigating online virtual worlds simpler by letting players use their own bodies — or even brain waves — to control their avatars.

Take the new position-tracking system developed by Tokyo University, which uses a mat printed with colourful codes and an ordinary web camera to calculate the player’s position in three dimensions.
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News from Second Life Grid

We have deployed version 1.22.4.90215 to the “Second Life Beta Server” channel of the Preview Grid. This version of the server code will be deployed to the production Second Life environment next week. It includes a few internal security patches and bug fixes. There are no resident-facing changes with this release.

Regions running the “Second Life Production Server” channel are running version 1.22.3.89352, which is the same version deployed to the main Second Life servers. See the blog post about the Preview Grid on our main blog for more information about logging into the Preview Grid.

Please use our Issue Tracker to report any new issues found anywhere on the Preview Grid. When reporting a problem, please be sure to include what region you were in, exactly what you did and what behavior you saw, when it happened, and the version of both your viewer software and of the server software running in the region where you saw the problem.

Source here.

“Be yourself, express yourself …”

This is the motto of SLC Company and we totaly agree with them. Serina Lacava, the owner of SLC Company is one of the best fashion designer in SL and many of us wear proudly at least one of her clothes from one of her collections. “SL Tribune” will try to present a few words about Serina and about her SLC Company.

Serina Lacava Collections begins in the middle of 2007 when she start as a fashion designer and on November 1st 2007, she founded her first mainstore.

She started with a few simple things like t-shirts and jeans, but grew very quickly because of the determination to learn how to make her own fashion collections and transform her wonderful ideas into wearable clothes touched by her style.

Now she can offer to her customers everything they can look for: both woman and man fashions, all hand made clothes and underwear, but also accessories like handbags and shoes.

For all needs or just new avatars, she also creates shapes, skins and hair for both man and women alike.

Every week Serina loves to chose a special offer for her customers: a complete outfit in which her work will shine.

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When NASA begins launching astronaut teams on 800-day missions to Mars, one of the greatest survival tests these explorers will face is the inevitable alienation they’ll experience with their remoteness from Earth and the harshness of the frozen Red Planet.

After rocketing halfway around the solar system for 180 nights, these astronauts will start the first of 500 days on the Martian surface observing a cocoa-colored dusk fade into a star-saturated nightfall. Earth, 400 million kilometers away, will appear as just a twinkling blue diamond in the skies. The astronauts will have never felt so alone.

But NASA thinks it has an answer to the psychological challenge of interplanetary isolation. While aerospace engineers are designing the Ares rockets to be deployed in the Mars missions, a more starry-eyed contingent at NASA is testing networking and virtual reality technologies that they think will connect the first wave of Mars pioneers with their families, friends and colleagues back on Earth, in a 3-D virtual world cut from the mold of Second Life or World of Warcraft.

“We want to help our remote explorers ‘phone home’ in a way that lets them sit around a dinner table with their family, help their children with homework and analyze the latest findings with their Earth-bound peers,” says Jeanne Holm, chief knowledge architect at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The initiative is the latest in the space agency’s enthusiastic push into virtual worlds. In May, NASA set up its own island in Second Life to enable online collaboration on technology projects, and the agency is working to create 3-D simulations of the orange-red deserts of Mars, so astronauts can experience the Red Planet before going there.

“Virtual worlds will play a key role in returning to the Moon and exploring Mars, says Jessy Cowan-Sharp, who helped create NASA’s CoLab island in Second Life.

But an interplanetary virtual world faces the seemingly intractable limits imposed by the speed of light. When on diametrically opposite sides of the sun, Mars and Earth are separated by 20 light-minutes; when closest, the planets are still four light-minutes apart. That’s a long ping time, and jacking into a virtual world over a radio link of that distance would be like diving into a vat of very thick molasses.

NASA can put a man on the Moon, but can it conquer connection lag?

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