And the last day arrived. The last conferences had to do with virtual worlds, and although I was not planning to attend the Second Life conferences since I literally hate it, in the end I summoned the will and went.
The first conference was called “Business Opportunities in Second Life”, and was given by Luis Sotillos Sanz, coordinator of SecondLife-Spain. The conference was held through Second Life, in a conference room in Novatierra, in which the speaker was placed on a platform as if it were a real conference, and slides even appeared on a giant screen.
Second Life is an online synthetic metaverse (universe within a universe) that has around 8 million registered users, of which around 2 million are regular users. The area of Second Life is 660 square km and they spend about $200,000 a day on it.
The main characteristic of Second Life is that events can be held that bring together many people “personally”, something that should be taken into account when starting a business in this metaverse. In addition, you must know Second Life well, since it is the only way to fully take advantage of its possibilities, as well as know and respect the community. Second Life is a 3D virtual world, so exploiting it like a web page would be a serious mistake. Lastly, you have to define a realistic business plan, and if there is competition, do it better than them.
I found this one of the most boring talks of all, although the fact that it was done through Second Life earned it points for originality. Thank goodness that during the conference a character suddenly appeared whipping and standing in the middle of the camera, something that was quite funny… until they banned him.
The second conference: “Life beyond life”, was given by Daniel Sánchez-Crespo, Deputy Director of the Art-Futura festival and director of the Master of Video Games at the Pompeu-Fabra University, but since he did not have a microphone (Or some similar problem) he had to hold the conference through VoIP, calling his phone. The conference sounded very bad, and at times it was difficult to follow the thread.
Daniel wondered if Second Life was just a fad, and said that there are many things that need to be improved if Second Life is to reach everyone. Starting with its painful and unintuitive graphical interface.
One of the main characteristics of Second Life is that the content created in the game belongs to its creator and not to the company that manages the virtual world, something that differentiates it from the well-known MMORPG.
But why are people interested in Second Life? Well, because they don’t like the real world and need to abstract themselves as much as possible. For this reason, a certain amount of care would have to be taken in the penetration of politicians and companies into this metaverse, since the moment it became the same as the real world, people would stop entering.