Second Life

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This article explains the virtual world. For the theory of multiple lives, see Reincarnation.
Second Life
Second Life
Developer(s) Linden Lab
Publisher(s) Linden Lab
Designer(s) Linden Lab
Engine Proprietary
Latest version 1.13.1.4 (Windows)

1.13.1.4 (Mac OS X)

1.13.1.4 (Linux alpha)[1]
Release date(s) 2003
Genre(s) Virtual world
Mode(s) Multiplayer (online only)
Rating(s) Not Rated
Platform(s) Mac OS X (10.3.9 or higher)

Windows

Linux i686
Media Download
System requirements Broadband Internet access

256MB RAM (Win, Linux)
512MB RAM (Mac)

50MB - 1000MB HD space for Disk Cache

800MHz x86 CPU or better (Win, Linux)
1GHz G4 or better (Mac)

nVidia GeForce 2, GeForce4 MX or better

ATI Radeon Radeon 8500, Radeon 9250 or better
Input Keyboard, Mouse
Second Life icon

Second Life (SL) is a privately owned, partly subscription-based 3-D virtual world, made publicly available in 2003 by San Francisco-based Linden Lab,[2] and founded by former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale. The Second Life "world" resides in a large array of servers that are owned and maintained by Linden Lab, known collectively as "the grid".[3] The Second Life client program provides its users (referred to as Residents)[4] with tools to view and modify the SL world and participate in its virtual economy, which concurrently has begun to operate as a "real" market. At precisely 8:05:45 AM PDT, October 18, 2006, the number of registered accounts in Second Life hit 1 million Residents.[5] Eight weeks later, on December 14, 2006, this number doubled to 2 million residents.[6]

Contents

[edit] Second Life as the Metaverse

Second Life is one of several virtual worlds that have been inspired by the science fiction novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and the cyberpunk literary movement. The stated goal of Linden Lab is to create a world like the Metaverse described in the novel Snow Crash, a user-defined world of general use in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate. Despite its prominence, it has notable competitors, among them Active Worlds, considered by some to be the founding company of the 3D internet concept in 1997, There and newcomers such as Entropia Universe and the Dotsoul Cyberpark.

External websites such as SL Census (domain now parked) allow Residents to locate each other from outside of the virtual world, and SLURL allows external links through the Second Life World Map to locations in-world.

[edit] Pricing

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Economy of Second Life. (Discuss)

Second Life has three membership plans. [7]

  • Basic — Free
  • Additional Basic — one time fee of US$9.95
  • Premium — There are three billing options for Premium accounts:
    • Monthly — US$9.95
    • Quarterly — US$22.50 (US$7.50/month)
    • Annually — US$72.00 (US$6.00/month)

All account types receive a signup bonus in Linden dollars (SL's in-world currency; see Economy) if payment details are provided — L$250 for Basic and Additional Basic, L$1000 for Premium. Providing payment details for Basic accounts is optional.

The pricing plan for Second Life has varied over time. Earlier versions did not feature free first-time Basic Accounts, or required a fee paid for every basic account beyond the first. During the beta period, Residents had the option of a lifetime subscription for a one-time payment of US$225.00. After the release of SL 1.2 and the introduction of tiered land payments, this turned into a lifetime tier-free ownership of 4096m2 of land.

[edit] Stipends

Eligible Residents receive stipends once a week - Basic and Additional Basic accounts have to log in during the weekly period in order to receive theirs, Premium accounts do not (they receive the stipend regardless of account activity).

Basic and Additional Basic accounts are not currently eligible for a stipend:[8] [9]

  • Those registered before May 29, 2006 receive L$50/week
  • Those registered after May 29, 2006 receive no stipend

Stipends for Premium accounts have also changed over time:[10] [11]

  • Those registered before July 21, 2006 receive L$500/week
  • Those registered before November 1, 2006 receive L$400/week
  • Those registered on or after November 1, 2006 receive L$300/week.

[edit] Land Ownership

Main article: Real estate (Second Life)

Premium members also have the ability to own land (up to 512m2 without additional fees). Owning larger areas of land attracts an increasing additional fee (what Linden Lab calls "tier") ranging from US$5 a month up to US$195 a month for an entire 65,536m2 of land or individual island.[12] [13]

[edit] Residents

Main article: Resident (Second Life)

Residents are the users of Second Life, and their appearance is their avatar. A person may have multiple accounts, and thus be multiple Residents (a person's multiple accounts can be referred to as alts), and a single Resident may have multiple avatars. All scripts and 3D content are created by Residents using nothing but the client, and even though animations, textures and sounds have to be created outside the client, every experience in Second Life is entirely user-created.

[edit] Recent improvements

The group tools received many improvements:

  • Ability to be members of up to 25 groups; previous limit was 15
  • Minimum group membership count reduced to 2; previous requirement was minimum of 3
  • Improved communication
  • Sending objects to everyone in a group (also possible to implement with LSL)
  • Defining roles and capabilities of roles (roles will be similar to the current Officer and Member title system)

These improvements were implemented on August 23, 2006, with the release of Second Life client version 1.12.0

[edit] Open standards

Linden Lab is an avid user of open standards technologies, and already uses such Open-source technologies such as Apache and Squid.[14]

[edit] Open Standards improvements throughout 2006

The plan is to eventually move everything to open standards by standardizing the Second Life protocol. Cory Ondrejka, Vice President of Product Development, has stated that a while after everything has been standardized, both the client and the server will be released as open source.[15]

  1. Throughout 2006 the built-in instant messaging system will be replaced with Jabber[16]
  2. The current proprietary LSL virtual machine will be replaced with Mono[17]
  3. uBrowser, an OpenGL port of the Gecko rendering engine, which has been used in the client since version 1.10.1 [18] to display the Help documentation, will also be used to display webpages on any of the surfaces of any 3D object the user creates.

[edit] Second Life protocol

Main article: libsecondlife

In May 2006 it was revealed that the Second Life protocol had been reverse-engineered. A wiki was set up to further the effort.[19]

Since Linden Labs has allowed third party programs to access Second Life,[20] a project called libsecondlife has been established. Among functions developed are a map API, recently-removed the ability to create objects larger than normally allowed, and other unforeseen capabilities.[citation needed]

[edit] Economy

Main article: Economy of Second Life

Second Life has its own economy and a currency referred to as Linden Dollars (L$). Residents receive an amount of L$ when they open an account if they supply credit/debit card details,[21] and used to receive weekly stipends thereafter — only premium accounts and basic accounts that were already receiving stipends currently receive stipends. Additional L$ are acquired by selling objects or services within the environment.

[edit] Land sales system

Main article: Real estate (Second Life)

Linden Lab usually sells land in small 512m2 blocks (16 by 32 meters) through its First Land program, or as entire 16 acre (65536m2) regions. Residents also buy and sell land to other Residents, generally intending to make a profit by selling the plots of land at a price higher than the original purchase cost.[citation needed]

[edit] Teen Second Life

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Teen Second Life. (Discuss)

Teen Second Life was developed in early 2005 for people aged 13-17 to play Second Life, without entering false-information to participate in the Adult Grid.

On January 1, 2006, the teen grid opening hours were increased to 24 hours a day, whereas it was previously open only during Linden Lab's office hours. [citation needed]

[edit] Differences

The 13-17 Teen Grid and the 18+ Main Grid are different in many ways.

[edit] Age

  • Teen Grid users are transferred to the Main Grid once they turn 18, taking all content and private islands with them. [citation needed]
  • Underage users found to be fraudulently accessing the Main Grid (e.g. by being under 18) that are transferred to the Teen Grid lose all their inventory, in an effort to prevent Mature content being transferred to the Teen Grid. [verification needed]
  • Overage users found to be fraudulently accessing the Teen Grid (e.g. by being over 18 and lying on the registration form) face banning from all areas of Second Life (website, Teen and Main Grid) designated teen only.[22]
  • Open Registration was implemented, but quickly removed for the Teen Grid, to increase security against users over age 18 from entering the Teen Grid.[verification needed]

[edit] Land

  • The Teen Grid is significantly smaller in the size of its userbase, the amount of land and concurrent Resident population at any given time. [citation needed]
  • The Teen Grid is a fraction of the size of the Adult Grid, and has significantly fewer Resident owned estates.[23] [24]

[edit] Content

  • The Teen Grid has a zero-tolerance policy for mature content, including gambling[citation needed] and nudity.[25]
    • Since nudity is not allowed on the Teen Grid, Teen Residents are unable to remove their underwear. However, Teen Residents can use textures with transparent sections for clothing — just as Main Grid Residents can — so that using completely or partially transparent underwear in combination with skins featuring genitalia, their avatar can appear to be nude.[citation needed] Such actions are against the Teen Second Life Community Standards.[25]
  • The client differs slightly, in terms of user-interface. [verification needed]

[edit] Economy

  • The Teen Grid, lacking the economic support of gambling and other mature content, has a much different economy. Land prices and in-world object prices are known to be different, as the average income for the people that play these grids differs. [verification needed]
  • LindeX (The Linden Lab endorsed trading service), however, takes from the same pool of Linden Dollars (L$) for both the Main Grid and the Teen Grid. [verification needed]

[edit] Businesses and Organizations in Second Life

Main article: Businesses and Organizations in Second Life
For information on Residents, and Residents who have achieved notoriety through Second Life, see Resident (Second Life)

A combination of Linden Lab granting Second Life Residents IP rights over their content,[26] and legal trading of the in world currency "Linden Dollars" (L$)[27] has encouraged both the creation of solely in-world business and user-groups, the creation of legally registered companies that were previously solely in-world, as well as encouraging previously unrelated companies and organisations to operate in or use Second Life in some way.[citation needed]

[edit] Live Music

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Live music (Second Life). (Discuss)
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Resident (Second Life). (Discuss)

Live music denotes the performance of vocal and instrumental music by Second Life Residents from their homes and studios, played into microphones, uploaded to audio streams, and played into Second Life for the enjoyment of other residents. It started with performances by Astrin Few late 2004 [28] and began to gain popularity mid 2005 [29]. Linden Lab added an Event Category "Live Music" in March 2006 to accommodate the increasing number of scheduled events.[30]

Live musicians in Second Life are typically already musicians in the real world, using Second Life as a way to reach broader audiences.[citation needed] Most artists perform individually with vocal and one instrument using their Second Life Avatar Name.[citation needed]

[edit] Issues and criticisms

Due to constant development, and as an open environment accessible by almost anyone with access to the internet,[31] a number of difficult issues have arisen around Second Life. Issues range from the technical (Mac OS X client, Budgeting of server resources), to moral (Pornography), to legal (Legal position of the Linden Dollar, Linden Lab lawsuit). In September 2006, there were also issues with customer security.

[edit] Unverified users

Prior to June 6, 2006, all users were required to verify their identities by providing Linden Lab with a valid credit card or PayPal account number, or by responding to a cell phone SMS text message. [32] (Users providing payment information were not charged if their account type cost nothing to create.) After that date, it became possible to create an account with only an e-mail address; even standard verification methods such as CAPTCHA and e-mail reply verification are not used.[33] This is an ongoing controversial topic as residents have argued that, since all security is based on an avatar's name, allowing free registration effectively eliminates it:[citation needed] if someone is banned from a particular area, or revealed to be a trickster or scam artist, they can simply create a new account with a different avatar name. Their new name is not on the ban lists and there is no way for anyone in world to know they are the same person again.

Linden Lab has the ability to ban unverified users from Second Life based on a hardware hash of their local PC,[34] preventing them from returning with other accounts, but this is an extreme measure and only rarely taken[citation needed], and may be inappropriate if multiple users use the same computer.

[edit] Mac OS X client

As of software version 1.10.0, all Mac OS X clients are Universal applications; owners of Intel-based Macintosh systems have reported that the Mac OS X client and the Windows client running under Boot Camp run about equally well;[verification needed] however, performance on PowerPC systems is still disappointing to some residents [citation needed].

Users of the Macintosh client do have to wait longer than Windows users do to receive updates, since offering the Mac OS X client exclusively as a Universal applications results in the filesize being over twice the size of the Windows client, and the pre-1.10.0 Mac OS X clients. [35]

[edit] Trivia

  • When objects are created (or instantiated) in-world and then transferred to the user's computer, they are said to "rez"--a reference to the Disney movie Tron. This also appears in the environment's internal scripting language, where the command to create an object is llRezObject().[36]
  • Linden Lab itself is named after Linden Street, the street where the company's first office was opened.[citation needed] Many of the simulators of SL are named after streets or alleys around the San Francisco area; the very first sim of the world to be set up was (and still is) named Da Boom, a combined reference to DeBoom Alley in San Francisco and to the Big Bang.[citation needed]

[edit] Competitors

[edit] Screenshots

Avatar customization in Second Life; over 200 settings to tweak

Building/modifying an object in Second Life with the in-world 3D modeling tools

A Second Life resident with a duck on his head.

Romance in Second Life.

Suzanne Vega's virtual performance in Second Life for public radio's The Infinite Mind.

Kurt Vonnegut's SL avatar created for his interview by host John Hockenberry for public radio's The Infinite Mind.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Linden Lab

[edit] Audio and video samples

The following is a list of media clips (audio & video). These may or may not belong in the News coverage section. Please help improve the Wikipedia by placing relevant links from this list into the News coverage section.

[edit] Mainstream Media Coverage

[edit] 2004

[edit] 2005

[edit] 2006

[edit] Broadcast

[edit] Magazines

[edit] Newspapers

[edit] Online and other media

[edit] References

  1. ^ Community: Linux Client Alpha. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  2. ^ Parker, Sam (June 23, 2003). Second Life goes live. Yahoo!. Retrieved on 2006-11-14.
  3. ^ Grid. Second Life History Wiki. Retrieved on 2006-11-14.
  4. ^ Resident. Second Life History Wiki. Retrieved on 2006-11-14.
  5. ^ Linden, Pathfinder (October 18, 2006). When *precisely* did we hit 1 million Residents?. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-14.
  6. ^ Terdiman, Daniel (December 14, 2006). 'Second Life' hits second million in eight weeks. Cnet News. Retrieved on 2006-12-14.
  7. ^ Membership Plans. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  8. ^ Linden, Robin (May 26, 2006). Change to Stipend Policy. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  9. ^ Linden, Chris (June 6, 2006). Exciting Second Life Registration Changes. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  10. ^ Linden, Philip (July 17, 2006). Linden Dollar Economy Announcement. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  11. ^ Linden, Robin (October 15, 2006). SL Economy - Stipend change for new accounts. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  12. ^ Land Pricing & Use Fees. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  13. ^ Land: Islands. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  14. ^ Greenemeier, Larry (October 17, 2005). Open Doors To Innovation. InformationWeek. Retrieved on 2006-11-14.
  15. ^ LugRadio Episode 42- I'm an excellent driver. LugRadio (January 16, 2006). Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  16. ^ Walsh, Tony (January 17, 2006). ‘Second Life’ To Go Open Source… Eventually. Clickable Culture. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  17. ^ Linden, Babbage (August 1, 2006). Second Life in Mono. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  18. ^ Version 1.10.1. SL History Wiki. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  19. ^ SL Protocol Wiki. libsecondlife. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  20. ^ libsecondlife FAQ. libsecondlife. Retrieved on 2006-11-26.
  21. ^ Second Life Registration FAQ. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  22. ^ Teen Second Life Terms of Service. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  23. ^ Map of Teen Grid. SL Maps (November 24, 2006). Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  24. ^ Map of Main Grid. SL Maps (November 24, 2006). Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  25. ^ a b Teen Second Life Community Standards. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
  26. ^ Second Life Terms of Service. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-18.
  27. ^ LindeX: Currency Exchange. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-12-08.
  28. ^ Metaverse Messenger: Tuesday, July 25, 2006. Metaverse Messenger (July 25, 2006). Retrieved on 2006-11-25.
  29. ^ Metaverse Messenger: Tuesday, August 9, 2006. Metaverse Messenger (August 9, 2006). Retrieved on 2006-11-25.
  30. ^ Version 1.9, Build 18: Other Changes. SL History Wiki. Retrieved on 2006-11-25.
  31. ^ Second Life System Requirements. Linden Lab. Retrieved on 2006-11-25.
  32. ^ What if I don't have a credit card, SMS, or Paypal?. Linden Lab Knowledge Base. Retrieved on 2006-05-16.
  33. ^ Linden, Daniel (2006-06-15). Abuse Levees Holding. Official Linden Blog. Retrieved on 2006-12-14.
  34. ^ Linden, Robin (2006-06-27). [UPDATE Open Registration]. Official Linden Blog. Retrieved on 2006-12-14.
  35. ^ Linden Lab. Community: Downloads. Retrieved on 2006-11-18.
  36. ^ LSL Wiki: llRezObject(). LSL Wiki. Retrieved on 2006-11-25.
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