You are currently browsing the monthly archive for Novembre, 2007.
After suffering a devastating stroke four years ago, Susan Brown was left in a wheelchair with little hope of walking again. Today, the 57-year-old Richmond, Va., woman has regained use of her legs and has begun to reclaim her life, thanks in part to encouragement she says she gets from an online “virtual world” where she can walk, run and even dance. Roberto Salvatierra, long imprisoned in his home by his terror over going outdoors, has started venturing outside more after gaining confidence by first tentatively exploring the three-dimensional, interactive world on the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »
For Christmas, Christine Louie has already found a pair of pointy red shoes for her girlfriend, tucked them into a pink box with a white bow and slipped them under the tree. Only her friend will never wear the red shoes. Nor will she match them with her clothes, store them in her closet or exchange them for a better-looking pair of shoes. In the latest example of how our real world is colliding with the online one, Louie’s gift exists only on the Internet on her friend’s Facebook page. Per Louie’s instructions, it can be “opened” on Christmas, when the gift wrap can be removed to reveal the red shoes. Read the rest of this entry »
The next epic video-game battle starts this week, but it won’t be fought with laser guns blasting away at frog-faced aliens. This showdown is all about the music. Starting Tuesday, the popular Guitar Hero franchise will be facing a new rival, Rock Band, which lets players not only live out their fantasy of playing hot licks for an adoring audience but do it in a four-piece group with their friends, whether they live down the street or on the other side of the planet. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s no secret that, for a long time, the iihadists were kicking American ass in the information war — especially online. Slowly, slowly, the U.S. government is starting to push back, just a little. The new arsenal of the propaganda campaign: Arab-language bloggers, podcasts, “webchats” — and maybe even Second Life and cell phone games, too. Read the rest of this entry »
Linden Lab released the WindLight First Look Second Life client Wednesday, the first serious release of Second Life that incorporates the technology Linden Lab acquired when it took over Windward Mark Interactive in May. We noted at the time of the acquisition that the technology would bring “better clouds and wind” to Second Life, but this was in retrospect an understatement. Having tested the new client, it not only brings photo realistic clouds to Second Life, it also introduces realistic water, and more importantly far improved shadow and time related graphical representations. Read the rest of this entry »
The editorial on Second Life in last week’s issue of The Santa Clara was well written. However, as an educator and entrepreneur who uses Second Life in the classroom, I have a few friendly responses. Read the rest of this entry »
CNN aims to find out by opening an I-Report hub in Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world created entirely by its residents. There, CNN will look to those most familiar with the virtual world — the Second Life residents themselves — to determine what constitutes news “in-world.” Developer Linden Labs opened Second Life to the public in 2003. According to its Web site, Second Life is inhabited by millions of “residents” from around the globe. However, traffic at any given time hovers around 40,000 users. Read the rest of this entry »
The authors of “The Second Life Herald” offer a startling statistic: More than 10 million people maintain an alternative, virtual existence in cyberspace. Players enter the most popular programs, such as Second Life, in this “metaverse” not to slay dragons or earn gold coins, but to do their laundry, exercise a pet or have sex. “The word ‘game’ doesn’t come close to describing much of what takes place in an online world,” Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace write in this lively new book. Second Life, for example, bills itself as a “3D digital world imagined and created by its residents.” It has a stock exchange; people buy and sell, practice religion and marry. Read the rest of this entry »
It doesn’t look like much, at least not from the outside. A pair of double doors on a quiet San Francisco street leading into a converted warehouse. The low morning sun casts shadows across the street, accentuating the edges of the surrounding buildings and making everything look sharper, more real. Once inside the double doors, though, reality effectively ceases to exist. Here there is no death, no disease, no pain, no gravity and no sex – or not as we know it. Here you can be anyone you want to be. Nine years ago a brown-haired, bug-eyed, boundlessly enthusiastic man in his late twenties called Philip Rosedale founded a website called Second Life. The principle behind it was simple enough. Using the latest technology, people would be able to enter a virtual world. There, they could create a new identity for themselves – an avatar. If they wanted to change sex, that was fine. If they wanted to have two heads and a tail and give themselves a silly name like Aurora Lunarsea, that was fine too. There were no limits, except the limits of users’ imaginations, and next to no rules. Read the rest of this entry »
Two students were hanging out in the de Saisset Sunday night. One had a green beard, one sported flip flops and socks. Both were naked. Things got weirder as they started humping each other to a soundtrack of moans and whines playing melodramatically in the background. A piece of Santa Clara reality? It’s a two-fold answer: Yes and no. Yes, it really happened, but something so bizarre could only take place in the digital world of Santa Clara’s Second Life island. And is that reality? Read the rest of this entry »
