Week 12: Second Life

Introduction

Second Life is a place where people meet & interact virtually through a virtual world. It's not specifically a game & there are no objectives one can tick off. Just imagine our world but transformed into a virtual world where you can control your avatar commanding it to do whatever you like, sort of like in the movie Avatar. Developers can create new objects and even sell them for a hefty price should they want to. These objects can be used by all avatars and consist of all imaginable things such as clothes, tables & much.... much more.

My Experience

Although I used to play some computer games in my early years, I grew out of them & it's now to me just a waste of time. That said, this is school work so it must be done, so I embarked into the journey of exploring this virtual world with my ugly looking avatar. The first thing I noticed is that the virtual world objects are painfully slow to load & this is because all the objects are downloaded from their server in real time. As a "Player" you only have a client/viewer which connects to Second Life's server and displays all the objects giving you the ability to control your avatar. In my opinion it's still not developed to the extent were people will actually enjoy their time on Second Life. I imagine a future where websites like ebay & facebook will be integrated with this sort of virtual 3D world were real people could interact with other people or buy real world items through a virtual world interface. People would probably enjoy something like that since they will be actually managing  their own real life through a 3D virtual world. Lately many movies have revolved around this idea such as the blockbuster Avatar & Surrogates starring Bruce Willis & It's probably an inevitable future and we will one day end up with something similar.

Features

When you first open your viewer you'll notice that before you login you can choose between a "basic" user type or an "advanced" user type. As a basic user, you are only allowed to participate in the virtual world by moving around, interacting with objects & socializing. On the other hand, advanced users can go into the world and create objects which in the future can be used by several other users who wish to make use of created objects. You can definitely see a difference in the interface when logging in the advanced mode since tools to create objects are added.

Conclusion

Quite different than any subject I've learned in my previous courses & in my honest opinion it's not an important one since I rarely ever seen a company making use of this type of world in it's operations. Maybe you are thinking to yourself that in the future it may come useful, well who knows maybe it will & maybe it won't but I'm almost 100% sure that if in the future anyone is interested in something like this a new platform will be developed.