Second Life
Live your life in a world unrestrained by physics, biology or any other real-world discipline. In this virtual world developed by Linden Lab, you can fly, look like a fox if you want to, or create utterly magical items with absolutely no “real” equivalent.
Virtual avatars: Walking the streets of Second Life
And, as in the real world, Second Life citizens can buy land, develop it, or simply wait till prices rise to sell to the highest bidder. The “local currency”, Linden dollars, can be exchanged for real US currency. Economics is the one thing that has been imported from the “real world” into this virtual land. This is also one of its vulnerabilities. Last year, Second Life had a bank run. People who bought virtual property thought prices would crash, and started to sell and withdraw their dollars. So Linden Lab lost money in the real world. This meant a currency crunch within Second Life. In turn, this impacted people who wanted to withdraw their real-world dollars from Lively.
Money isn’t everything, though—even in Second Life. Many citizens develop counterparts of real-world assets—such as their actual clothing and cars. This world is rife with people giving seminars, foreign language classes, and even groups building temples. So, Second Life looks a lot like real life.
You build yourself an avatar and go look for people with similar interests. This takes social networking to the next level. In Second Life, you can study with a person from Turkey, build online devices with pals from the US, and fly in the sky with people from Delhi. Unlike a computer game, there is no set mission to complete Second Life. Instead, the online world is a new frontier waiting for you to discover and enjoy as you wish.
But this utopia extends only to the borders of Linden Lab. As with Vegas, what you do in Second Life stays in Second life. Your creations, possessions and friends cannot be moved to another location. It is a members-only site, and taking that membership isn’t easy. You need to fill a flurry of forms, then download and install a client software. This is time consuming and usually takes an hour.
The woes continue: Second Life is graphics-intensive, so if you have an old computer or a slow Internet connection, your experience will be marred by glitches, your avatar will move jerkily and all actions will likely be prefaced by a long, excruciating wait. In India, low Internet speeds mean few people can actually transcend to this life.
Google Lively
The new virtual world from Google lets you live a freer life, virtually. It’s not constrained by long downloads. Nor is it restricted to a specific set of users. Here, too, you can roam various 3D “rooms” with different themes: a sci-fi room for fans of that genre; a “Brasil” room; the Google headquarters, complete with T-Rex skeleton, and several more.