Second Life is the largest and best known of several virtual worlds created to attract a crowd. “At Second Life, everything you experience is inherently experienced with others.”

“When you are at you are actually there with 10,000 concurrent other people, but you cannot see them or talk to them,” Mr. Kapor, the software pioneer and Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder - say that the entire Internet is moving toward being a three-dimensional experience that will become more realistic as computing technology advances.Įntering Second Life, people’s digital alter-egos - known as avatars - are able to move around and do everything they do in the physical world, but without such bothers as the laws of physics. Virtual world proponents - including a roster of Linden Labs investors that includes Jeffrey P. Screen grabs from the Second Life universe, which is fast becoming a three-dimensional test bed for corporate marketers, including Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Sun Microsystems, Nissan, Adidas/Reebok, Toyota and Starwood Hotels. “It’s taken off in a way that is kind of surreal,” Mr.

Now, more than 30 companies are working on projects there, and dozens more are considering them. Philip Rosedale, the chief executive of Linden Labs, the San Francisco company that operates Second Life, said that until a few months ago only one or two real world companies had dipped their toes in the synthetic water.

Unlike other popular online video games like World of Warcraft that are competitive fantasy games, these sites meld elements of the most popular forms of new media: chat rooms, video games, online stores, user-generated content sites like and social networking sites like. For businesses, these early forays into virtual worlds could be the next frontier in the blurring of advertising and entertainment. The sudden rush of real companies into so-called virtual worlds mirrors the evolution of the Internet itself, which moved beyond an educational and research network in the 1990’s to become a commercial proposition - but not without complaints from some quarters that the medium’s purity would be lost.Īlready, the Internet is the fastest-growing advertising medium, as traditional forms of marketing like television commercials and print advertising slow.

Linden labs sold second life