Second Life

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Second Life

• A User Generated Virtual World

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Player Customizations Modifications

• User modification is not new
• Example FPS multiplayer mods
• Extensive customization makes SL unique
• In-game and collaborative content creation

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What can be created?

• Land/Terrain
• Clothes
• Buildings
• Furniture
• Vehicles
• Toys
• Games
• Plants
• Anything
• Everything
• Et cetera

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Object Modeling

• Primitive shapes are provided
• Cube, wedge, pyramid, cone, cylinder, sphere,
  etc.
• Manipulation techniques
• Position, rotate, stretch, texture, etc.

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Language of Second Life

• LSL was created for Second Life
• Syntax is very similar to C
• Example
• default
• state_entry()
• llSay(0, Whats the good word?!)
• touch_start(integer total_number)
• llSay(0, Teh InterWebs Rox.)

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Distributed Grid Simulation

• Topologically tiled grid of "nearest neighbor"
  connected machines
• Each machine controls a square land region
• simulates physics
• manages objects
• runs scripts (behaviors)
• manages terrain
• Machines only talk to their 4 immediate neighbors
• Players transition from one machine to another
  transparently
• Scales well Just add new machines as land is
  developed

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Controlling Content Creation

• One would expect bad, unfinished content
• Solution In-game economy model
• Players are taxed for possessions such as land
• Players buy/sell created content
• Spreads popular and well made content
• Poorly constructed content is not distributed

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Content Distribution

• SL is extremely LARGE
• Millions of Objects
• Objects created/modified/deleted constantly
• Literally 10s of Terabytes of data
• Solution Stream only what is currently visible
• New and modified objects are streamed upon
  encountering them
• Audio and video are also streamed in some areas
  of the game
• Professor Dovrolis will discuss bandwidth
  concerns

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Second Education

• Virtual classrooms
• Variety of fields
• Many organizations
• Universities, libraries, museums, etc.

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Interesting SL Stats/Facts

• Total L 3,574,080,111 (L 290 1 US)
• 897,711 unique logins during Sep 2007
• 44,631 users with positive US cash flow
• 138 users generated gt5000 US during Sep 2007
• 7,555,452 transactions during Sep 2007
• Islands have sold for 200,000 US
• Many companies have islands
• Ranging from Intel to Playboy

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Questions?