There has been a great deal of recent attention in the Fairfax press (www.smh.com.au) and blogosphere (silkcharm.blogspot.com) concerning BigPond’s presence in the virtual world, Second Life.
One issue that has caught the attention of critics was the placement of pictures from a competition conducted by BigPond on land adjacent to the area containing Uluru.
The digital representation of Uluru at BigPond's Second Life estate has been a feature since the estate was created in March 2007. The intention was to create a massive landmark that would be mysterious and forbidding. The allocation of such a large amount of Second Life real estate to such a work of art was, and remains, a bold and powerful statement.
In parallel, BigPond has established a community within Second Life based, as far as possible, on liberty, respect and tolerance. These values have informed the protocols of nonintervention that have been a central touchtone of community life. Their existence may partly explain why so many people from around the world have chosen to make BigPond's estate in Second Life their home as effectively permanent residential tenants.
But when an issue such as the inappropriate placement of competition entries near Uluru is brought to BigPond's attention, it takes action to intervene. And so it was that the images were removed promptly in response to the recent stories in the Fairfax press. This is an exercise of de facto executive privilege which BigPond tries to minimise. If BigPond were more interventionist, it would arguably be a breach of the inworld community's expectations about self-determination and organic democracy.
Some people felt that BigPond should never have created Uluru in Second Life. Perhaps those same people believe BigPond should retire Uluru now. Would such critics prefer BigPond to convert the sim into innocuous summer cottages rather than Uluru?
Perhaps it would be better for BigPond to convert the Uluru sim into a place at which Australia can offer international political asylum for refugees seeking a socially tolerant retreat - where Australian friendship and values bring some comfort to those who come into Second Life from places that don't enjoy the same social mores. Perhaps BigPond can find a symbol of that: instead of Uluru, a vast salt lake like the one in Western Australia. The salt would represent our nation’s desert austerity and the significance of water for us in the context of global climate change.
Second life is a lightning rod for such issues, which explains its fascination for so many people. The scope for creative decisions is as wide as the landscape is open. There are attempts to find competitive substitutes such as Google’s Lively and Sony’s Home, but these remain unproven and do not foster the kind of creative freedom which is a central engine of Second Life’s success.
One new contender to be launched shortly is a new browser plugin that converts any Web site visited into a 3D world. It automatically takes the digital assets (including all the advertisements) on a Web page and inserts them into its evocation of a 3D "room". The result is like a cross between CoolIris’s PicLens, Google Lively and Second Life.
This new plugin allows users to appear within a room as an avatar. The avatar can be moved around the room via the mouse. If a group of people using the plugin all come to a Web page at once, they each see each other's avatar interacting with the Web page's content within the 3D world - and can talk together about the content on the Web page as they consume it.
The new plugin will automatically arrange a Web page's constituent elements (pictures, text, video and audio) into a 3D environment that is revealed within a browser window. Music goes in a 3D jukebox, videos go up on a cinema screen, pictures are arranged on billboards around the room and a representation of the original Web page scrolls in a wall-mounted display within the room.
Companies such as Facebook and MySpace have created templates to optimise their sites for this software technology. When users visit Facebook.com, a person's friends' profile pages appear as doors in their 3D room, through which people can pass for a visit. It's shades of the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. It remains to be seen how the marriage of virtual reality worlds with Web pages will fare, but certainly these new products will attract much larger groups of people to experiment with the potential of both.
BigPond offers both fast Internet access and media such as movies, music and games. Both of these, access and media, are important factors in creating innovative experiences in the area of virtual worlds and many new products are planned. Meanwhile, BigPond will continue to offer the events, competitions and community values which have attracted the almost 100,000 people who have registered to obtain an avatar through the BigPond.com signup process for Second Life (my.bigpond.com). As these pictures of the BigPond community gatherings (JPEG - 145KB) on Australia Day, Anzac Day, Mardi Gras and Valentine’s Day 2008 attest, there continues to be strong interest.
The new BigPond sales, service and support centre in Second Life (see pictured - right) is already selling real world products successfully. And traffic continues to tower over BigPond's well-known brand competitors (see statistics).
Indeed, data published by Linden Lab appears to corroborate that Second Life itself has continued to grow this year by reference to criteria such as the amount of land owned, the dollar value of user transactions and the number of concurrent users (see statistics).
Second Life average revenue per user (ARPU) is claimed to tower over that enjoyed by brands such as Google, Yahoo and Disney (see statistics). New products now available such as a slim client which enables instant messaging and voice chat between the real world and Second Life avatars, may accelerate these trends. A variety of mobile clients which permit Second Life to be accessed from broadband enabled mobile phones such as those on the NextG network, are also being taken up enthusiastically by virtual world users.
It was only as recently as March this year that companies such as Fuji Xerox were taking full-page ads in publications such as The Australian Financial Review announcing their new presence in Second Life. Such an advertisement is a significant sign of seriousness, and something of an investment in itself. It is worth remembering that we are entering an era of ubiquitous computing interfaces when companies will have an opportunity to establish immersive virtual experiences not just in Second Life but within a wide variety of games. And as boundaries between virtual worlds, the Web, PCs and game consoles start to dissolve, we will see the way media companies make money from the Internet and content change profoundly. BigPond will be in a better position to flourish in that new world as a result of the experimentation it conducts today.
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