Or perhaps you suspect a bad call by the line judges at Wimbledon. Ever wondered when the International Space Station might pass overhead? At the spaceflight museum, your avatar can fly alongside models of the station, the Hubble Space Telescope, and many other satellites as they orbit a 10-meter-diameter globe in sync with real-world data from the Air Force Space Command. In that sense, this hideaway from the reality outside is beginning to function as an alternative lens on it. I do a lot of random stuff.”īut aside from such diversions, the navigation tools provided by Second Life–users can fly and hover like Superman and zoom between micro and macro views of any object–make it an excellent place to investigate phenomena that would otherwise be difficult to visualize or understand. I watch sunsets and sunrises, go swimming, exploring, riding my Second Life Segway. “I dance far better than I do in real life. “I help out new citizens, I rent some houses on some spare land I have, I socialize,” says a longtime Second Lifer whose avatar goes by the name Alan Cyr. And life inside is almost as varied as it is outside. It’s a world with birdsong, rippling water, shopping malls, property taxes, and realistic physics.
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Second Life, which started out four years ago as a 1-square-kilometer patch with 500 residents, has grown into almost 600 square kilometers of territory spread over three minicontinents, with 6.9 million registered users and 30,000 to 40,000 residents online at any moment.
Just to the south, on an adjoining island, is the International Spaceflight Museum, where visitors can fly alongside life-size rockets, from the huge Apollo-era Saturn V to a prototype of the Ares V, one of the launch vehicles NASA hopes to use to send Americans back to the moon. And he’s not the only one to offer such attractions. “But how many of them are just messaging one another in class?” A few more science students might learn something if they could walk inside a weather map, he reasons.Ĭorbin’s got plenty to show off: just west of the map is a virtual planetarium, a giant glass box housing a giant white sphere that in turn houses a giant orrery illustrating the geometry of solar eclipses. “Every student at DU is required to have a laptop,” he says. (On the map’s scale, my avatar is about 500 kilometers tall, which makes Illinois about three paces across.) Corbin, who’s on a personal mission to incorporate 3-D tools like this one into the science curriculum at Denver, paid Linden Lab for the island so that he could assemble exhibits demonstrating to the faculty how such tools might be used pedagogically.
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The map I am standing on belongs to NOAA, and it covers a 12-by-20-meter square of lawn on a large virtual island sustained entirely by servers and software at San Francisco-based Linden Lab, which launched Second Life in 2003.
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