Lunarez

the metaverse space agency

Second Life

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a fast growing population of millions of people from around the globe. Second Life is not a videogame, but a complete platform for business and entertainment. See the Second Life website.

Second Life is the most popular non-gaming VR world at this moment. Especially since the introduction of voice, it is a suitable workspace for collaborative work by remote teams. There are other experimental VR platforms more suitable as collaboration environments, but none has the popularity of SL at this moment and, despite some occasional bad press (if such a thing exists), we believe it can provide the best virtual environment and workspace for the Lunarez project in its initial phase.

Space in SL

There is an active community of space enthusiasts in Second Life, where Nasa and other space agencies and interest groups have established a presence. For example in the image below an avatar, in a NASA astronaut attire, watches the realistic movement of a Mars airbag descending a Martian hill. The Mars recreation is on Explorer Island, near NASA Colab. From the paper Astronomy in Second Life: A User’s Perspective: “The Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) at Caltech has a strong and growing presence in SL and based on Explorer Island with amazing model building of past, present, and future space technology. In one area it appears they are experimenting with stereoscopic images of the lunar and Martian surfaces. One corner of their sim is dedicated to recreating portions of Mars. Avatars should watch for dust devils, rovers, and bouncing Mars airbags”.

The Lunarez Society will be one of the main Second Life space communities.

Posted by G.P. on 12/21/07
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