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You may or may not be aware, but early to mid March marks two significant Australian anniversaries in Second Life: a year since the Telstra BigPond and ABC presences in Second Life launched.
We’ll be writing more on both in coming days, but today I stumbled across another Telstra presence in Second Life. Two islands, Telstra Experience and Telstra Innovation aren’t part of the BigPond islands but they do come up in Second Life’s search functionality.
The Innovation island isn’t publicly accessible but I had a wander around the Experience island, and as the notecard offered on arrival says, it’s a replica of real-llfe Telstra Experience centres, one of which is nearing completion in George St Sydney. It’s very much an enterprise and government focus versus the BigPond end-user focus of the larger presence.
Because the build is a replica of a real-world one, it’s far from an immersive, creative experience, with standard corporate office-space containing multiple video viewing areas. My guess is it’s also being used as a prototyping tool for the real-life builds in Sydney and Melbourne. There’s nothing wrong with any of that and it does demonstrate the growing awareness by the corporate world of the utility of virtual worlds in non-consumer, non-brand awareness applications. I doubt we’ll see the islands launched with much fanfare, if at all. And that’s the way it should be.
The full text of the in-world notecard:
“The Telstra Experience Centre (TEC) is a new state-of-the-art facility built for our customers, now replicated in Second Life.
The TEC has been designed to provide business and government customers with hands-on experience with Telstra’s world-class technology, service and media capabilities. Customers will be able to see, touch, feel and use Telstra’s products and services. Most importantly, this centre allows customers to explore solutions using Telstra’s Next IP™ Virtual Private Network and Next G™ high-speed wireless broadband network.
This Telstra Experience Centre in Second Life is designed to give visitors a taste of what to expect from the RL centre. It also allows us to experiment with the use of Second Life for RL collaboration and projects across business and government applications.”
I received a media release from Amazing Worlds (formerly Mirror Worlds), to announce some pictures and video of their offering, which is still under development.
The photos are located here or check out the video on You Tube :
The new information shows that Amazing Worlds is well underway and it certainly has a Second Life feel about it. Because it’s touted as a 3D tourist world, the standout issue for me is people. Like Second Life, it appears that there’s lots of non-populated space, which gives an extremely different impression than real life. In Second Life that dissonance isn’t a major issue but for a world wanting to give people an immersive example of its real life alternative I believe that’ll be a big challenge. What do you think?
Linden Lab today announced the creation of the SLED Blog, a welcome evolution from the busy SLED email list. Education is certainly one of Second Life’s strong points and a well maintained blog will help this along further.
If you’re one of those people who get excited by networking hardware, then you may be interested in Cisco’s upcoming launch in Second Life of its latest network processor, Quantum.
Cisco are not surprisingly being coy about the technical details of the processor prior to the launch – suffice it to say the in-world build has a walk-through area that contains the word exabyte.
The event is being held on the 4th March at 10am PST (5th March, 5am AEDT) with musical acts and the launch itself. I’d love to hear from any Australians excited enough to attend at that time…
Health and education are two of the standout wins demonstrated in Second Life. The latest health-related build is sponsored by Cisco and it’s a mighty impressive result. As a health professional myself I can see that immersive medical training could bring enormous benefits.
I did have some difficulties getting some of the medical equipment to work with my avatar and there’s also a lot of video content so lag can be a big issue during busy periods. Overall though it’s obvious that significant corporate sponsorhip can bring about very intricate builds in Second Life that benefit the medical community.
As we’ve previously mentioned, SydSim is Telstra’s replica Sydney CBD that started development in November 2007. In December I was critical of the build’s nature.
I dropped in again this week and there’s been some significant progress i.e. a lot more buildings and other objects. It’s starting to show some potential although I’m still uncertain as to how engaging it’ll be. That will probably depend on the rental aspect – if the right sort of tenants move in then a momentum of its own will develop.
I contacted BigPond’s media contact for comment on the build’s progress but haven’t received a response as yet. What are your thoughts – is SydSim something you’d like to be part of or is it too much like a mirror world?
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