Your Second Life is Ready

Now I just want to get out of here. I push a button on my screen that says â€fly.†Instantly, I´m hovering 50 feet above the ground, gazing down on an island that looks like Hawaii populated with characters from Star Trek. I check my (real-life) watch and remember that Ihave business to take care of. I´m meeting SL journalist Wagner James Au, who has spent the past three years documenting the evolution of SL in his blog New World Notes (nwn.blogs.com). Unfortunately, the meeting
is in SL, and I have no idea how to get there. Then I see a message at the corner of my screen: Au is offering to teleport me there. I click â€yes,†the screen goes black, and suddenly I´m standing on
a lovely balcony overlooking the sea. Next to me
is a man in a white trench coat. â€Welcome to my office,†Au says. â€Let´s go buy you some hair.â€

We teleport to a shopping area called Midnight City, where the skies are dark and buildings glow with neon-lit virtual fashion items for sale. As I browse the goods, occasionally flying a few feet in the air to peek into second-story windows, I realize that the current Web has forced us into a cramped two-dimensional space that doesn´t quite capture the way humans naturally think, socialize, and, well, window-shop. Second Life could bring us back to the three dimensions where we belong.

Streaming a New World

A couple weeks later, I´m on my way to the real-life San Francisco offices of Linden Lab, nestled near the Bay at the edge of the city´s North Beach district. There are no elves here, but the woman who greets me does have blue hair. Inside, surrounded by tilted glass walls and wide-open workspaces full of toys, it´s hard to shake the feeling that I´ve walked into a weird outpost of virtual reality.

A guy with a giant smile and spiky gray hair who wears a familiar jeans-and-T-shirt combo pops out of his office to say hello. He´s Linden Lab´s CEO, Philip Rosedale. The resemblance between Linden Lab and SL is no accident, he tells me. He wants both to be social working environments, or what he calls â€the perfect spaces for building things.â€

Seven years ago, Rosedale left an executive position at streaming-audio company RealNetworks to launch a 3-D world where groups of people could gather â€to realize their dreams and ideas.†At that time, there was a belief in the computer industry that only artists and game designers could create 3-D objects and so there wasn´t any point in setting up a virtual world based on the idea that ordinary users would build everything there. What those naysayers hadn´t counted on was the explosion in broadband adoption. Faster Internet connections allowed Rosedale and Linden Lab´s chief technology officer, Cory Ondrejka, to create a graphics system built on streaming images. That means everything you see in SL is coming to you live from Linden Lab computers. All the intense computational work is done before it reaches your screen, so SL can be ever-changing. This is completely different from most videogames, where everything you can possibly see has been predetermined and pre-drawn and is stored on a CD or cartridge.

Rosedale´s other big idea was to offer SL residents easy-to-use building tools to help them create stuff the way one might in programs such as Photoshop and PowerPoint. Rosedale´s plan worked, and SL quickly caught on with a broad demographic, not just
twentysomething male ber-geeks. Today, there are as many women as men using SL, and the average age is 32.