Virtual Ventures

Leading a second life--in cyberspace

By Felicia Russell

Forget the sweet sands and salty surf; Eric Hackathorn’s trip to Hawaii was a working vacation. He had to drag himself out of bed to give a presentation at 3:30 a.m. to people on the mainland. And he went to a hearing of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Internet—all without leaving his hotel room. He did it in virtual reality.

Hackathorn is one of a growing number of Boulderites who lead double lives: their “first life” and a Second Life. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world, accessible over the Internet, where people work, learn, create, play—and sometimes play naughty—through digital representations of themselves called avatars.

“Certainly, a person in Hawaii wouldn’t usually have the opportunity to sit in on something in D.C.,” Hackathorn says. But geography is inconsequential in Second Life, where you can fly, walk under water and teleport to the other side of the continent in seconds.

NOAA designed a virtual volcanic island to help educate Second Life users about weather and the ocean. Photo courtey NOAA

The Skinny on Second Life

Los Angeles-based Linden Lab formed in 1999 to develop Second Life, and unveiled it to the public in 2003. Second Life isn’t a game because it offers no objectives or ways to win. Rather, it’s a digital world created by its 13 million users. Joining and exploring Second Life are free; all you need is a fast Internet connection, a fairly recent graphics card for your computer, and free downloaded proprietary software.

“It is a very multifaceted environment. It’s kind of like coming into a potter’s shack and finding a lump of clay. What are you going to do with it?” says Eric’s father, Richard Hackathorn, a former information systems professor at the University of Colorado’s business school and owner of Bolder Technology, Inc.

Although there are a number of online virtual worlds, Second Life was the first to give users intellectual-property rights over things they create “in-world.” That means users can buy, sell, trade and give away their creations. (It also means that people can steal, which has led to at least one lawsuit for copyright violation.) Second Life residents have built digital clothing, shoes and hair, as well as mighty wings, whiskers and wee-wees. There are art galleries, shopping malls, temples, jungles and underwater worlds. You can buy a guitar or a flying car, or programs to make your avatar simulate winking, dancing or copulating.

This entrepreneurship has given rise to an economy that has made some people rich. In 2006, BusinessWeek featured Anshe Chung, the avatar of a Chinese language teacher living in Germany, who built a Second Life real estate empire worth $250,000 in the real world. Second Life residents buy and sell virtual products, services and land with Linden dollars, which can be exchanged for real currency on the LindeX exchange. (Islands, for example, currently cost more than $1,675, plus a $295 monthly maintenance fee.) In February 2008, more than 6,000 users reported a net gain of $100 or more in Second Life. And in 2007, users cashed out between $5.5 million and $7.5 million a month.

Objects in Second Life are built using “primitives”—basic shapes like cubes and cones that can be stretched, scaled, bent, and modified with color, texture or animation. The avatars that users create can resemble their real-life body, their ideal body, their pet rabbit’s body or something in between. In Second Life, skin color, body type, hair, clothing and accessories are all malleable.

Most people spend their first few months in-world making over their avatar like a Barbie doll, visiting nightclubs and playing games, says Carolyn Oakley, a Boulder musician and Web designer. But after a while they tend to ask, “Why am I here?” Faced with that existential question, some simply log off for good. Others go in deeper.

Work in the Virtual World

Which brings us back to Eric Hackathorn and his working vacation. As manager of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s virtual-world program, he went to Hawaii to start developing “Virtual Hawaii” for NOAA’s next Second Life project. When it’s finished, “Virtual Hawaii” will include things like luaus, windsurfing, volcano explorations and journeys to the center of the Earth. NOAA’s goal is to create cultural and scientific Second Life adventures for each state in the Union.

Hackathorn first started exploring Second Life on his own time in spring 2006, and found himself developing some prototypes for 3-D NOAA exhibits. The idea intrigued his boss, who encouraged him to keep working. Eventually, inspired by the possibilities Hackathorn’s tinkering created, his higher-ups agreed to purchase an “island” in Second Life. NOAA put out a request for proposals and held a design competition among the three finalists. At that point, “in good Second Life fashion, we opened the island up to the Second Life community and let them tell us who should win,” Hackathorn says.

One of NOAA's two Second Life islands that feature interactive exhibits. Photo courtey NOAA

NOAA now has two islands featuring interactive exhibits that teach people about weather and the ocean. You can stand on a beach during a tsunami, ride in a plane over a hurricane, get your feet wet as you watch a glacier melt, and explore the effects of pollution on the ocean.

Educational opportunities abound in Second Life. Through their avatars, people from all over the world can ask questions of librarians, sit in on National Public Radio’s Science Friday, take a class from Harvard, explore space travel with NASA, and wander through a virtual gallery of Van Gogh paintings.

In fact, many Second Life users see virtual worlds as simply another way that humans abstract reality. “Humans started virtualizing when we created language and made markings on clay,” Richard Hackathorn says. “When you are interacting with someone over Second Life, is that any less real than a videoconference?”

While it may not be less real, communication in Second Life is different than chatting over the phone or writing an e-mail. All in-world conversations once took place through typed messages, but Second Life now offers the option to talk with other residents on headsets. Communication is somewhat limited because avatars still seem animatronic; they don’t show much meaningful body language.

Nonetheless, some Boulderites are using Second Life to teach communication. “I’ve found that through tech-space applications, people find very effective and emotive communication,” says Kate Casavecchia Crisp, who first logged on to Second Life to expand the work she does with the Prison Dharma Network and Peacemaker Institute. She leads regular meditation sessions and nonviolent communication groups, both in Boulder and in Second Life, with people from around the world. “That’s the unique thing about Second Life. People can meet in real time and have relationships almost like in real life,” Crisp says.

Family Time

Carolyn Oakley and Shawn Collins share a home in north Boulder, but keep separate houses in Second Life. Both have rich social networks in Second Life, where they enjoy attending concerts, meeting with friends and building their in-world consulting businesses. Occasionally they log on with their younger daughter to visit educational islands; once, all three hopped a ride into space to explore the solar system. However, minors technically are not allowed in Second Life for their own protection, and are relegated to a teen version. Even so, Oakley and Collins prefer to not let their daughter roam the teen grid because it tends to be a little wild.

Shawn Collins’s avatar, far left, poses on the lushly developed beachfront “land” and bungalow Collins rents for $10 a month. He’s considering becoming an owner on another island, “though I love the many Europeans who are my current ‘neighbors.’” Photo courtesy Shawn Collins

Some parts of Second Life are rated PG for people who would rather avoid the seamier side of in-world society. But in many places that are rated Mature, it’s not unusual to see avatars prostituting themselves, setting virtual fires and shooting one another. Oakley and Collins call aggressive or antagonistic people “griefers.” [After just 20 minutes in Second Life, I met my own griefer. He was tall, bald and bare, with a Ken doll’s blank stare and crotch. When I pointed out that he was naked, he placed his hands on his hips, stood with his legs spread wide and asked, “Do you like?”]

Reality Bytes

The social benefits of Second Life haven’t been lost on the business world. Richard Hackathorn says that 50 to 70 large corporations have established a presence in Second Life, and that “IBM and Sun Microsystems literally have hundreds of employees in-world.” Some companies have begun using Second Life as a virtual meeting space. IBM has built conference rooms on its island so that programmers from around the world can meet to exchange ideas and test new code in the virtual world. After all, virtual meetings are cheaper, greener and easier to get to than real-life meetings.

Second Life does present some challenges for large organizations. If a company commonly held meetings in a virtual world, employees who were blind, deaf or immobilized might not be able to participate, and could find their professional potency limited. This could lead to lawsuits under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Another challenge, Eric Hackathorn points out, is that it’s harder to control what happens in virtual reality than what happens on a website. “It takes a certain amount of acceptance of risk,” he says. “And I applaud NOAA for taking on that risk. We’re way ahead of public policy here.”

Boulder’s Serious Second Life Group meets monthly at CU’s ATLAS Building. Group members are in the room both in their physical bodies and onscreen as their avatars. Left: Deborah Wise, a virtual-worlds researcher at CU-Denver, visits the IBM island, magnified on the screen.

In April, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Internet held a hearing—the one Hackathorn sat in on from Hawaii—titled “Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium.” It was the first time U.S. lawmakers formally discussed the legal implications of virtual worlds. But Second Life has already attracted the attention of big news organizations. The news agency Reuters even has an avatar reporter dedicated to the Second Life beat.

Hackathorn thinks it’s important for government and educational institutions to establish a presence in the virtual world. “It’s the direction the population is moving,” he says. “If we don’t get involved in this technology right now, I think we risk losing track of a whole generation and what they expect.”

Pixel Predictions

Virtual worlds are immersive by design. They draw the player in with bold sound and graphics, exciting activities and a sense of limitless possibility. Second Life, like a really good book, can at times feel more real than real life—which, in some observers’ view, could be a problem, especially for the younger generation. It takes only a few moments of people-watching at a mall, high school or college campus to realize how important technology has become for today’s gaming, text-messaging, online-networking youth.

“Opportunities for technological interactions are replacing those very important empty spaces in life where we build confidence and learn how to be alone,” says Leysia Palen, an assistant professor of computer science at CU. Still, “no technology is good or bad; it’s what we do with it. Terrorists use cellphones and so do nuns.”

At this point, the technology behind virtual worlds is too fragile for holding large gatherings or storing sensitive information, and it will probably be several years before large organizations invest much time or money in them. “But there’s no doubt in my mind that over time, virtual worlds will have a huge impact on education, the way we do business and more,” Richard Hackathorn says. “The technology has the potential to follow the same maturity curve and have the same impact on our society as the Internet.”

Palen is a bit more cautious. “Second Life does have a really important future in our society, but so does plain text messaging, because that’s light technology,” she says. It’s hard to imagine walking to work while navigating a virtual world on your BlackBerry or cellphone. Even in this complicated world, sometimes simplicity wins.

Felicia Russell, a former Boulder Magazine editor, has taught science and often writes about it. She is working on a book for children.