This is a historic day for Second Life, and for virtual worlds in general. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another. It’s an important first step toward enabling avatars to pass freely between virtual worlds, something we’ve been working toward publicly since the formation of the Architecture Working Group in September 2007. These are still early days, however, so amid all the excitement, we thought it would be helpful to clarify exactly what we’ve done — and what still lies ahead.

Q: What did Linden Lab and IBM accomplish with this experiment?
Researchers from IBM and Linden Lab teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid to an OpenSim virtual world.

Q: Why is that significant?
It marks the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another, an event with implications for the entire virtual world industry. As the name suggests, the Open Grid Protocol used in the project enables interoperability between virtual worlds. With this experiment, we’ve taken a Read the rest of this entry »

About a year ago in my first visit to Second Life, the popular online virtual world, I spent half an hour trying to make my avatar, or online character, look like a hotter version of myself — which isn’t easy when you don’t know how to use the tools. When I finally made it onto Money Island to mingle, a stranger approached me and said, “Hello there, Devon.” I froze. Then I tried to run. I was desperately searching for the teleport tool when my sister walked into the room, peered over my shoulder at the computer screen and said, “Why’d you make your avatar ugly?” I logged off.

I didn’t realize how instructive my sister’s question was until recently, when I discovered research being done at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL). Jeremy Bailenson, head of the lab and an assistant professor of communication at Stanford, studies the way self-perception affects behavior. No surprise that what we think about ourselves affects the confidence with which we approach the world. What is a surprise is that this applies in the virtual world too. With my plain=Jane avatar and my inexperience in Second Life, I did what most people would want to do in an uncomfortable social situation: run away.

What’s more, Bailenson’s research suggests that the qualities you acquire online — whether it’s confidence or insecurity — can spill over and change your conduct in the real world, often without your awareness. Bailenson has found that even 90 seconds spent chatting it up with avatars is enough to elicit behavioral changes offline — at least in the short term. “When we cloak ourselves in avatars, it subtly alters the manner in which we behave,” says Bailenson. “It’s about self-perception and self-confidence.” But researchers are still trying to …

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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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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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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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