Second Life: A New Hope?

This series of Business Week articles maps out more than a year of high hopes and incredile public mood swings related to the newly minted Second Life 3D virtual reality environment (Update April 19: The Business Week search engine seems to be down. This Google Search result list offers access to the same and other articles….). The world might be addicting, yes, but only if you can get on it. A soccer tournament organized in Second Life by students enrolled in COM 435 (Communication and Emerging Technologies) at Purdue University showed that Second Life is far from a universal success. Issues as diverse as grave client incompatibility with most ordinary computers, major system slowdowns when more than a handful of avatars access the same region, and as subtle as a lack of coordination and communication tools, seriously hinder the medium’s diffusion among ordinary users. A full report on our conclusions will be posted here in the near future.

Add to this the looming dark-gray clouds threatening Second Life’s business model (sex and gambling) to understand why the project might be in serious trouble.