viralavatar: What is SecondLife

This is a Homework that i did for my Academic English course here in Copenhagen

Second Life is the closest thing to a parallel universe existing on the Internet. It is a virtual, three-dimensional world where users create and dress up characters, buy property and interact with other players. Partly based in 3-D, the virtual world was made publicly available in 2003 by San Francisco-based Linden-lab. SL is a MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), it means that SL is an internet computer game which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously, and is played on the internet.

The users in SL (Second Life) are called Residents tools to view and modify the SL world and participate in its virtual economy, which concurrently has begun to operate as a "real market" In October 18th 2006, the population of Second Life hit 1 million Residents. More interesting is that in the last 60 days there were 504.000 new subscribers. Residents in SL are rappresent like avatar. The means of avatar is A person may have multiple accounts, and thus be multiple Residents. SL is an Open-source technologies. This mean that all people can create or modify all that the users want: clothes, bodies, cars, houses, worlds!

Second Life has its own economy and the money in this worlds is Linden Dollars (L$). Residents receive an amount of L$ when they open a new account. There are so many kinds of jobs, infact the residents have a stipends.

There is also a version for the younger. It’s name is Teen Second Life. Teen Second Life was developed in early 2005 for people aged 13-17 so that they could play Second Life, without entering false-information to participate in the Adult Grid. The Teen SL has a zero-tolerance for mature content, including gambling and nudity. Teen Residents, infact, are unable to remove their underwear. It is so interesting! The avatars who rappresent the Residents that rappresent the users, are like a mirror…it is for this reason that in Teen SL the young people can’t be naked.

Many brands are worked inside SL. Some ex: Adidas, Reebok, BBC radio, Disney, IBM, Intel, MTV, Toyata. Some ex:

1) The agency Reteurs opened a virtual news bureau in October. Reuters plans to begin publishing text, photo and video news from the outside world for Second Life members and news of Second Life itself.

2) At the end of September, the advertising company Leo Burnett and Arc Worldwide launched a creative department in SL. Called Leo Ideas Hub, the department will bring together more than 1,600 creatives from the global network. Devised by Leo Burnett London, the project will be a centre where creatives can interact with colleagues from around the world.

3) In August 2006, the singer Suzanne Vega became the first major recording artist to perform live in SL avatar form. This forms part of a larger project sponsored by The Infinitive Mind, a public radio show that made the Infinitive Vision Media to create a permanent presence in Second Life.

The SL’s tools.