Second Life, the new rage in cyberspace, delivers the rare delight of letting you create and control your destiny. S Mane lives it up
My Tech
Imagine a place where your every wish becomes a reality. You can be an elf like Legolas in JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings or own more cars than Jay Leno. You can buy more property than Donald Trump and party at the coolest night spots.
All of this and more is possible on Second Life, (www.secondlife.com) a three-dimensional virtual world where people assume different avatars of themselves. Launched three years ago by Linden Lab, Second Life has been inspired by Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel, Snow Crash, which describes a ‘metaverse’, a place where resident members can create a virtual replicas of themselves and glide through a 3-D landscape, chatting with other avatars, doing business, etc.
In Second Life, you can create everything from scratch: uber-cool race cars, Coloseum-like buildings, and retain full ownership of your virtual creations. While many of the 10 lakh-plus residents use this world simply as an outlet to fulfil their wildest fantasies, there are others who have turned it into money-making venture.
A majority of this boils down to real estate (some things never change!). Linden Lab sells or rents virtual property to residents and has even created its own currency, Linden dollars (L$), and a currency exchange, LindeX. Transactions are conducted like any online deal and real money does exchange hands; 271L$ is equivalent to one US dollar (Rs45).
The system has given rise to a number of virtual entrepreneurial ventures with at least 5,000 entrepreneurs making $20,000 (Rs8,95,000) or more a year. Second Life even produced its first millionaire, Anshe Chung, recently. Residents pay rent or buy virtual homesteads from Chung.
Being wildly creative and innovative can earn you money. With the site’s software tools, residents can create anything and sell these to other members. And according to the Second Life’s rules, the innovator retains the rights to the creations.
All this activity has caught the attention of the corporate world as well. American Express, Intel and IBM are some of the companies to build virtual conference rooms so that far-flung employees can exchange information and build prototypes of real-world projects. Sports companies launch their newest virtual products here, and Toyota sells virtual cars.
As the technology and graphics improve, and business gets better, the possibilities are infinite. Imagine a real-life retail clothes outlet opening up a virtual store where your avatar can try out clothes on your behalf. Or attending the political rally of a famous leader. Flying dinosaurs, seaside bungalows. It’s world bereft of the barriers of reality.
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