Research Opportunities in Second Life

Vancouver.
The first keynote at AoIR 2007 is by John Lester, the Boston Operations Director of Linden Lab, who run Second Life (John's SL avatar name is Pathfinder Linden). He notes the fact that each avatar in Second Life represents one human user as a key feature of this online world (which is different from some multi-player online games), and also points out again that Second Life is not a game, but a virtual world. As a result, too, Second Life is extremely dynamic in its content, and there's no way to cache or pre-load much of the world; the SL software in essence works much like a Web browser, as a generic interface to whatever exists at any one place in the virtual world.

Second Life is many things to many users, then - from users playing it as a game to others providing commercial services within it, to whatever else can be imagined. Linden acts much like a Web hosting company in this context - making money from hosting in-world content, but otherwise providing free access to the world. The community is older (at a median age of 35) and better gender-balanced than comparative spaces, and John suggests that real-world skills (for example in content creation, in programming) translate directly into Second Life, unlike conventional multi-player online games. One particularly interesting aspect which John highlights is that scripts within SL can communicate with data sources outside of the space, enabling the cross-connection of SL and Web-based resources, for example.

John goes on to note the richness of relationships between people and places within Second Life, and encourages more researchers to engage with these phenomena; he points to the unpredictability and open-endedness of interactions within the space which is due to its flexibility, designability, and programmability, and the 'oasis of the surreal' which results from such expressive experimentation. This also enables a much richer social interaction than is possible in more cue-limited online environments, John suggests - he highlights the role of proxemics in Second Life, for example. Increased perceptual immersion leads to increased emotional bandwidth, he says - we are trading the tyranny of geography for the bondage of bandwidth, but Moore's Law is on our side.

New tools which are currently being developed are the WindLight advanced atmospheric rendering system (also allowing the generation of skies and other atmospherics as tradeable assets in the space), as well as better 3D voice and sound rendering utilising spatialisation and attenuation, and sculpted 3D primitives which allow for complex and organic shapes to be created. Increasingly, then, some participants are also able to recreated shared spaces which are directly based in reality (such as Vassar College's recreation of the Sistine Chapel) or extremely imaginative and artful (such as the Straylight Island region) - and John suggests studies of user behaviours within such simulated, special, perhaps sacred, environments as an interesting research topic.

Further, the educational uses of Second Life are also becoming increasingly interesting. Real educators use the space to teach using simulation and experiential learning, as well as to teach new media art, programming, cultural studies, language training, and much more; they simulate real-world environments (such as the hurricane simulation by NOAA), conduct surreal, Cirque du Soleil-style live performance art, play live music, exhibit art, recreate historical spaces, or create artificial digital ecosystems. Additionally, the intermingling of Second Life and real, live events offers an opportunity for mixed reality events.

One quickly developing area in Second Life is its use as a community support system, especially for medical patients and disease sufferers. People with Aspergers, stroke survivors, and others recuperating from or dealing with serious illness are able to regain some confidence in interacting with the real world by practicing in SL; the system can augment users' (sometimes perhaps limited) physical abilities and enable them to be more of who they really are. Another community aspect of SL is its increasing interconnection with other social networks, enabling social proprioception (that is, allowing users to know where people in their social network are (going to be) located in the space). And increasingly we're also seeing moves towards the interchangeability of bits and atoms, through 3D scanners and 3D printers, further interweaving users' first and second lives.

John finishes by noting the long history of new media, and the role of users (not developers) as innovators especially of the social uses of media technologies. Many early developers and users get mired in past frameworks, and it is only prolonged use which allows new and innovative uses to emerge and rise to popular recognition. Virtual worlds, he suggests, leverage the fact that our brains do five things very well: navigate a 3D environment; communicate and create communities; learn through shared experiences; use tools; and take partial data and create something whole.

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