Whatever happened to Second Life? Your reaction

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

My recent feature “Whatever happened to Second Life?” certainly struck a nerve.  At least two people called for me to be sacked, Second Life blogs swelled with indignation and one die-hard Second Lifer delivered the finest stream of foul-mouthed insults I think I’ve ever read (click through to The Ephemeral Frontier if  – like me – you’re not easily offended).

There were also more than 50 comments on the feature itself, many of which are lengthy, measured and insightful. They clearly took a lot of time to write and I thank you for taking the time to contribute. Incredibly, some even agreed with me.

Here I’m going to round-up a selection of the comments and issue my response to them.

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H.M.G. Gets a Life

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

According to this BBC news article our beloved Civil Service has splashed out the thick end of £20,000 on a virtual home inside Second Life. This is the online virtual world you may have seen cropping up in various odd places like CSI:New York or sundry other moving-picture sources. It’s not really hit the general public, possibly because we currently have no Raymond Baxter figure to tell us all about it with appropriate gravitas and a twinkle in the eye – but nonetheless, the Department of Work and Pensions seem to have got the idea, very quickly… whatever that idea might actually be.

The BBC report quotes the DWP as suggesting that the Second Life setup could help with carbon emissions reduction, presumably by allowing people to “meet” virtually and share sundry 3D structures. This was something I spotted when I first looked at it in 2006, though I must say I now regret the email I wrote saying it was clearly a step-change in technology and a strategic platform, a bit like the Global Positioning System, and it was a serious issue that Europe didn’t have one of these to ourselves.

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Meet Edd Hifeng, AI powered Second Life avatar

Monday, May 19th, 2008

It had to happen at some point, and now an AI powered avatar is being tested within the Second Life virtual world by its creators, researchers at the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory. According to reports, Edd Hifeng has a mental age of about 4 years and is capable of only basic AI reasoning. As such he can engage in simple conversations such as where are you from, but only if the question is put in English and even then only if it has previously been translated into a mathematical logic so that Edd understands it. Not exactly cutting edge of AI is it?

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