Lately, it seems there’s been a lot of press about something called Second Life. What is it and why am I mentioning it in this blog? We have challenged the organization to look into this technology and evaluate possible opportunities that may help grow our business virtually.
Second Life is the leading implementation of an Internet-based 3-D multi-user virtual environment – a metaverse. A metaverse is a fully-immersive 3-D virtual space where people interact socially and economically through a visual metaphor of the real world.
Since it opened in 2003, more than six and a half million Second Life accounts world-wide have been created. Account holders are known as residents, and thirty to forty thousand new residents join Second Life daily.
The Second Life 3-D virtual world is represented as real estate – interlinked regions known as islands. Some residents rent or own real estate and build virtual structures on them. Other residents visit and interact within those structures.
Residents are represented by avatars. An avatar is a 3-D animated figure whose appearance and motions are controlled by the user. Residents communicate through text-based chat and instant messaging, and through the motions, expressions, and gestures of their avatars.
People socialize in Second Life. They go to parties at virtual nightclubs; they play games, they attend concerts and artistic events; they create the structures and objects in the virtual world; and they buy accessories for their avatars. The Second Life 3-D virtual world has a real economy with over $1.5M in business transactions daily among residents.
The Second Life 3-D virtual world is also a venue for real-world study and research. More than 120 universities and educational institutions around the globe use Second Life as an environment for distance learning, cooperative work, simulation, new media studies, and corporate training.
Other real-world corporations are using Second Life for marketing, customer support, training, conferences, and recruiting. Businesses use Second Life to advertise, test products and market ideas.
Since its inception, Second Life has been developed as a public virtual world. But in the near future we expect that businesses will be able to develop, maintain, and manage an internal metaverse – a private virtual world - in the same manner as a corporate Intranet.
At Honeywell Aerospace, we are actively researching how we can leverage Second Life to better reach and serve our customers. We have launched a prototype project to test concepts and more-easily envision possible value-add business applications in the 3-D virtual world of Second Life. We believe the metaverse will be an important business tool of the future. Our initial focus will explore Second Life in the customer training experience.
I’ll continue to keep you updated on our progress and the virtual grand opening of our business.
Adrian
