Second Life getting more realistic, but not necessarily better

Matt Marshall | May 25th, 2007

secondlife-disaster1.jpgVirtual world site Second Life one again is making news, acquiring new technologies to make its environment more realistic.

On the other hand, Second Life has been taking some hits lately.

First, the new technology: Linden Lab, which owns Second Life, has acquired two assets from Windmark Interactive, which make lighting and environmental simulation more realistic. They are Nimble, which helps create things like 3D clouds, and WindLight, for improving how light interacts with natural terrain, man-made objects, water, clouds and particles.

But the latest stats show that few people are visiting the corporate sites being set up in Second Life by folks like Coca Cola and Dell. Their headquarters were practically empty, with Coca Cola and Dell having an average of 1.5 visits an hour on average. Maybe its because visiting Dell isn’t exactly what people have in mind when they visit a fantasy world.

Meanwhile, miscreants attacked the site of an Australian company, ABC Island, blowing up two months of work. See image above, which shows the explosion before it was later restored to its original version by Linden Labs (top left in picture).

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  1. October 10th, 2007
    11:37 pm

    VentureBeat » First annual Virtual Worlds conference celebrates $1B in investment, maybe said:

    [...] the failure of much of the hype around Linden Lab’s Second Life to come to fruition, advancing technology and innovation [...]

3 Comments

  1. May 26th, 2007
    1:03 am

    Ian Betteridge said:

    Although the “ABC island blown up!” story makes a great headline, I have yet to see any evidence that this is what happened. The fact that the same thing happened to other, completely unrelated, areas at the same time - and was, in fact, a bug - suggests that ABC is making a mountain out of a molehill.

  2. May 26th, 2007
    8:02 am

    hunter said:

    what does people not going to Coke and Dell’s in-world presence have to do with “Second Life not getting better?” The acquisition of technology and success of lame corporate builds is totally orthogonal? Dell built a replica of Michael Dell’s college dorm room - i mean why would you visit that?

  3. May 28th, 2007
    9:44 pm

    webbeat said:

    second life is a big nothing. lots of one time gawkers and a few wacky diehards.

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