Croquet 2 Play

Simon Spartalian (SL’s Simon Jezebel) is a Chicago art student who has introduced a service that lets Second Life residents produce real-life versions of their in-world objects, possessions or selves.

3pointD.com » Blog Archive » The Value of Translating the Virtual to the Real

A friend of mine in Second Life confided that she felt physical comfort when her avatar was held in the arms of her digital lover.

Recursive Instruments

I previously linked to an Amazon store in Second Life, but didn’t mention that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is an investor. Jeff’s not the only one who sees a big future in Second Life:

Mitch Kapor: “Second Life is a disruptive technology on the level of the personal computer or the Internet.”

Scripting News: 8/21/2006

Kapor, chairman of the board of Second Life’s producer Linden Labs, made the above statement in his keynote at the recent Second Life Community Convention.

For folks who don’t want to follow the physics or the money or George Clinton, here’s more “evidence” …

After all, when you’re in Second Life, you’re just looking at computer-animated figures on a screen– how could it possibly matter where they’re sitting, or how long they’re looking into each other’s eyes?
New World Notes: THE SPACES BETWEEN US

The researchers being referenced concluded that …

… many patterns of physical interaction in the real world carry over into the virtual world. In other words, our insistence on embodiment in virtual environments structures social interactions in these worlds in ways that we may not consciously be aware of. On the other hand, this implies that virtual worlds may be useful platforms for studying things even as visceral as the rules of physical interaction.

Terra Nova: The Prison of Embodiment

The post also mentions a book coming out this fall which says:

Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture

One can shrink the distance between the music and the technology even further by examining the relationship between the Dead and Funkadelic, and more significantly the influence jazz had on those two particular bands and counterculture movement in general. Read more

Actually I should say real in another way since the atoms that make up the bits of data stored and displayed by a computer are very real.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, which oversees such well-known hotel brands as Sheraton, St. Regis and Westin, will launch its newest chain, Aloft, in the online society “Second Life” in September.In the brick-and-mortar realm, the plan is for the first Aloft inn to open sometime in 2008, catering to active, urban 30- to 50-year-olds. But the real-world lodge will be preceded by a 3D cyberversion designed to prompt feedback from virtual guests and help guide the earthbound endeavor.
“We think the SL world is a specific community of early adopters, of tech-savvy people who like to voice their opinions,” said Brian McGuinness, vice president of the Aloft Hotels brand.

Aloft will be the first hotel for “Second Life,” which has already incorporated businesses from Wells Fargo to Major League Baseball. Marc Schiller, CEO and founder of ElectricArtists 2.0, a marketing services company, approached Starwood two months ago with the idea of a virtual debut for Aloft. Starwood then purchased an island in “Second Life,” and construction began on the hotel a month ago.

Second Lifers get first look at new hotel chain | CNET News.com

There are several nice screenshots of Aloft.

The song Paradigm on George Clinton’s recent CD How Late Do U Have 2 B B 4 U R Absent? closes with the statement “The virtual is real”.

As hard as this may be to believe, there is real money changing hands among the players in these games, Bowen reports. An estimated $1 billion worldwide is spent by users buying and selling virtual goods, such as furniture for virtual houses and clothing for their avatars. But it’s paid for with real-world credit cards — at Second Life alone, $6 million a month.Is Virtual Life Better Than Reality?, Living Online — With Dream House, Job, Friends — May Be Preferable For Some - CBS News

It shouldn’t be so surprising that people are making money in virtual economies. People buy things that are outside the human sense of touch all the time. People pay for MRIs and satellite radio signals and Wall Street is a virtual world where people trade in “financial instruments“. All of these have the same real existence as goods in virtual worlds - bits on a disk. Physics agrees with this. A bit on a disk is as physical as your fingers, it’s made up of the same atoms bound together with the same laws of subatomic physics. As the song says - “let the shakin begin”.

I am pretty sure that I’m not crazy, but I just might be an emissary from the future. … Don’t forget that web pages were the crazy and futuristic new thing just 10 or 12 years ago.
Amazon Web Services Blog: Life2Life - ECS-Powered Amazon Store Within Second Life

My thoughts exactly!