Friday 9 May 2008

Second Life - notes from an interview with Philip Rosedale

A few notes from an interview with Second Life creator Philip Rosedale.

Second life covers an area of 462 square miles and is expanding at a rate of 5% per month.

It has a storage of capacity 100Tb and uses 18,000 servers dispersed over 3 data centres - each server managing 16 acres of land area.

Second life sysems can cope with 1 million simultaneous users - they are currebly at around 60% capacity.

250 people work at second life.

They have an ambition to "become the web" - arguing that the interaction mode is more natural and is less language dependent.

Connections with the real world are likely to become stonger - e.g. go virtula shopping for real items that will be delivered or watch youtube videos from a second life venue.

There are plans for a much improved interface - for the graphics they are working on better resoultion and functions like reflection. For the modes of input they talk much about new 3D camera technology that can locate a person, seperate them from their background and map their movements onto an avatar - one option is to manipuate virtual objects with realworl gestures.

I think that second life has great potential for synchronous meetings - the interview ends with discussion of the potential of second life in holding meetings.

Second life

1 comment:

  1. Just looking at an excellent article on Techcrunch about just this:
    http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/11/twitter-second-life-spontaneous-web-meetspace/

    I haven't used voice in SL yet but you can see how it could make the experience much more fluid.

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