“There’s just a huge amount of creativity being expressed, not just in the various environments you can explore, but also in the way people create their avatars,” says Burr. But once you venture beyond those virtual terrains, you’ll discover digital wonders, all completely designed by Second Life users. Linden Labs, the developer of Second Life, provides little pre-made content-just a few lands for new users to get their bearings, explains Matt Burr, one of the original SciFri Second Life members. Unlimited creativity and freedom of expression draws users to virtual worlds like Second Life. Credit: Lynn Cullens Meet The Original SciFri Second Lifers Avatars would gather around to listen to the show with Ira Flatley, who sat in the middle. We’ll also hear from Celia Pearce, an associate professor of game design at Northeastern University, and Katherine Isbister, a human computer interaction and games researcher at the the University of California, Santa Cruz, about how virtual worlds like Second Life can help us cope with the quarantine-induced reality we live in now. Producer D Peterschmidt catches up with the group to find out what they had to do to survive in the virtual landscape, what the online community is like today, and what they’ve learned while spending over a decade in Second Life. But we recently learned that for the last ten years, some members of that original community have still been meeting up virtually to listen to the show every week. Sadly, after a couple years, our staff left Second Life, and the space was dismantled. We livestreamed our show in-world every Friday, and a huge community of avatars-humans, fairies, wolves, dogs with wings-would gather with us every week to listen. Second Life was so big that Science Friday created a community there in 2007. Do you remember Second Life? That online virtual world where you can create an avatar, build whatever you want, and meet people? It was a hit in the late 2000s, quickly becoming a pop culture phenomenon-and it had over a million users at its peak.
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