Your Second Life is Ready

More than a dozen colleges are also experimenting with SL. At Montana State University, architect Terry Beaubois taught a class from his office in Silicon Valley using SL, flying out (on a real plane) to meet his students in person only every two weeks. SL is perfect for architecture, he says, because replicas of full-scale structures can be created and demolished in seconds; plus, â€you can fly around and look at the buildings without any people in them.†A version of Beaubois´s classroom could become the standard for long-distance learning. Unlike Web-based classes, which are rich in content but low in back-and-forth interactions, SL classes can involve informal chatting and collaborative work on 3-D models of molecules, engines-anything.

The final step for SL is what
residents call â€mixed world†events: gatherings that take place simultaneously in SL and in the real world. At a conference earlier this year, Linden Lab threw a party at which attendees sipped beer and chatted next to a giant-screen projection of the SL version of the gathering, and a webcam streamed an image of the real party into SL. When people waved at the webcam, avatars saw it and waved back. People chatted across worlds, with small social groups forming around keyboards. There was a sense of immediacy in the communication-the screen on the wall was just another room into which the party had spilled over.

As SL broadens, imagine a similar mixed-world meeting of the United Nations, or a mixed-world congressional hearing. Citizens could do more than watch on C-SPAN; they could actually participate by lining up at virtual microphones to ask questions through their avatars. SL might enable the electronic town-hall meetings that the Internet has long promised but rarely delivered.

Creating a Coliseum

Now I´m full of ideas, and I´m itching to make something of my own. So James Au guides me to one of SL´s many â€sandboxes,†designated areas where residents create objects that are wiped away every 24 hours. You can take your objects with you if you want to keep them.

â€OK, let´s start with spheres,†Au types when we arrive on a vast plain where, far away, I can see some people making a racecar. Au waves his arm, and as if by magic, a giant sphere appears in the sand. We use a suite of tools similar to those in Photoshop to stretch the sphere, twist it, and give it color. Then I push a button that makes the shape solid. Now we can give it weight, or make it light and bouncy.

â€Wow, that´s so cool!†I say. I´m ridiculously proud to have made a thing that looks like a blue lump. â€That´s nothing,†Au replies. â€A friend
of mine built a Roman auditorium and slapped it down on her island.â€

His story captures the present-day ethos of SL, where everything you can imagine can exist. But it also hints at what makes this virtual world a window onto the Web´s future. Not only is it a cool place to visit, but it´s a cool place to build things that other people will use. And it´s that urge to make, to expand, that helped the Web go from zero to ubiquity in less than a decade.

It reminds me of something Rosedale said when I visited Linden Lab: â€In Second Life, you can get everything you want on the first day. What´s interesting is what you do the next day.â€

Annalee Newitz wrote about electronic voting in the November 2004 issue.