Dwight Schrute gets a 'Second Life,' still needs a first one
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Two characters in Thursday night's episode of 'The Office' banter about the Linden Labs virtual world.
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After big layoffs and management turmoil, the developer of the metaverse There looked near death. But $14 million in new funding has pumped some life into the company. By Daniel Terdiman.
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Viruses go virtual For about two hours, the virtual landscape of Second Life filled with golden rings and the distinctive two-tone ding of Sega's popular Sonic the Hedgehog games.â¦
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Artificial Life, a brazen Hong King Company has invented a new (and I use the next term very loosely) game. For those men without a girl, and who have exhausted every other method of finding companionship, comes the Virtual Girlfriend.
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Children have always enjoyed  make-believe. Now, some new Web sites are letting them live out  their fantasies in virtual worlds using self-designed avatars.
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Second Life, the fast-growing online   site where hundreds of thousands of people play out fantasy   lives online, has suffered a computer security breach that   exposed the real-world personal data of its users.
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The third annual Second Life Community Conference features plenty of hopeful talk about lofty new possibilities for the virtual world.
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Second Life, the fast-growing online  site where hundreds of thousands of people play out fantasy  lives online, has suffered a computer security breach that  exposed the real-world personal data of its users.
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(InfoWorld) - As the number of virtual environments increases, standards and vendor collaboration will help make teleporting between different worlds a smooth experience, ensuring, for instance, that your avatar arrives in a new world still wearing the clothes it donned in your home world. Currently, Linden Research Inc.'s Second Life is the most popular virtual world, outshining a number of alternative universes such as Active Worlds and There. "A lot of people are looking at Second Life and saying, 'Let's do one of those,'" said Bob Sutor, vice president of standards and open source at IBM Corp. "The last thing you want is a lot of different ways to do the same things. You need standards for how to teleport between different virtual worlds and to bring objects with you." Besides an avatar's clothes, those objects could include the money it was using in your home virtual world as well as a presentation you might want to share with your colleagues or potential customers. Issues to consider include the mechanics of teleporting between worlds, Sutor said. If you invite someone from another world to come and visit your world, would they need to become a member of your environment or could you simply issue a guest pass? Can a person retain their home world identity in a new world? He also wondered how people will communicate across worlds, for example, via IM (instant messaging). That could be achieved by agreeing on a common service or setting up gateways between different IM systems. IBM's set to debate these issues on Friday at a virtual worlds event it's cohosting with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge. Sutor will be there along with Mitch Kapor, the chair of Linden Lab, and a variety of academics and companies including Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc. and PepsiCo Inc. Sutor applauded Second Life's move in January to make the source code for its end-user viewer application freely available. The viewer enables users to do a variety of things in the virtual world, including controlling avatars, communicating and buying and selling objects. "They've set a very interesting precedent," he said. Sutor expects that other virtual worlds will follow suit. Like the open-source movement, "virtual worlds are fundamentally about communities coming together," he added, looking forward to the establishment of a global community of developers focused on building worlds based on open standards. Sutor has been using Second Life actively since November and has been detailing in recent blog postings his virtual world requirements . That's a common experience for users once they've adjusted to moving around in a virtual world, he believes. "After they've finished walking into walls, they probably say, 'This is OK, but I really wish it did X, Y or Z'," Sutor said. "The odds are other virtual worlds have that. Looked at in total, we probably have much of what people would like implemented already available somewhere." For example, World of Warcraft, a hugely popular multiplayer online role-playing game, has many features that could be applied in other virtual worlds, he added. Businesses are experimenting with virtual worlds, particularly inside Second Life. "They're mostly translating 2-D marketing ideas into a 3-D world, which is more or less successful," Sutor said. But looking ahead, questions arise around the meaning of the retail experience in a virtual world. For instance, what kind of artificial intelligence will companies use to determine how sales assistants in virtual stores behave when a customer walks in? Will the customer be approached by the sales assistant closest to them or by the assistant who looks the most like them, Sutor wondered. Alternatively, will the sales assistants be programmed to examine the customer's avatar to determine what you're likely to purchase and therefore which assistant could be of the most help to you? Â
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Real Software is adding an object-oriented introspection capability to its RealBasic rapid application development tool Tuesday and has set sights on tuning the product for Web development.Supported on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh, RealBasic gives Visual Basic developers a familiar environment. "It's similar enough to Visual Basic that a Visual Basic developer could switch to RealBasic [very] quickly," said Geoff Perlman, Real Software CEO.RealBasic is an object-oriented, compiled version of Basic. With RealBasic 2008 Release 1, available Tuesday, an introspection capability allows a program to get information about itself, such as in an object-oriented system with classes. Introspection would allow a program to find out what a class has in terms of properties and methods at runtime. This aids developers by allowing them to write code to make it easier to assess properties. Developers can write code that is more generic.A software developer using RealBasic, Charles Yeomans, a contractor working for Dakim, said the addition of introspection is "huge.""Introspection makes it much easier," to do database-related work, Yeomans said. He has used RealBasic to develop applications for Dakim, which makes cognitive fitness solutions, and also has used it to build front-end software for his wife's law firm.RealBasic's cross-platform capabilities have been beneficial, said Yeomans. He said he can develop on the Macintosh and test on Linux.RealBasic has been used for building various systems, including vertical market and government applications. Yeomans said the product now is not suitable for Web application development. But Real Software does plan to outfit the product with Web development capabilities."Our goal with RealBasic is to allow a Web application [to be developed] in the same way [developers] build a desktop application," using such capabilities as a form generator, said Perlman.Under Real Software's plan, RealBasic could become a bit more like AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). No timeframe has been set yet for adapting RealBasic to Web development.RealBasic 2008 Release 1 is being announced at the MacWorld conference in San Francisco. The professional version of the product, featuring cross-platform capabilities, costs $500.
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San Francisco-based company Second Life has opened up its virtual world to the mobile phone, and is looking for interested beta testers to put the application through its paces.
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What the business press didn't tell you Analysis Two weeks ago, business leaders at Davos gave their blessing to Linden Lab's Second Life. They hailed the spectacular growth of its virtual economy while politicians spoke of democracy itself moving into its online world.â¦
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By Stephanie Dunnewind, Seattle Times  Feb. 10--Want green skin and purple hair? No problem -- if you're exploring Nickelodeon's recently launched virtual world, Nicktropolis.
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TechWeb - IBM will allow non-IBMers to traipse through the 3D replicas of its real world premises that are located in the virtual world of Second Life.
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Tonightâs episode of âCSI: NYâ which uses the virtual world Second Life as its theme is getting a lot of attention. Bill Carter described the episode back on Oct. 4. TV Guide notes that âSecond Life also makes an appearance on âThe Officeâ this week, and under a fictional name it figured in a [...].
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Blog: In an attempt to better organize the news coming out of Second Life, a new streaming radio station emerges to disseminate information about the oft-fragmented virtual world.
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Retailers and manufacturers are setting up shop in Second Life, the three-dimensional online world, hoping that users will steer their avatars to real world stores.