Second Life - My Travels

After struggling a bit to get Second Life working on my computer, I took the liberty of doing a little meandering here and there to get a feel for the environment, some of which I had done previously at the motorcycle event.

And boy, what an exciting few days it's been. I was present for the prostitute onslaught, I witnessed a cursing naked potato man running around with an M60 machine gun, and I've stumbled across, and even gotten kicked out of a few locales that wouldn't be entirely appropriate to mention here.

However, I digress.

One of the more.. kosher areas I stumbled upon was through a link found right in Istania itself. I had heard interesting things about Dell's Dell Island, and, I was certainly eager to check out their Second Life presence.

Upon teleporting to the island, I was struck by the imposing Dell logo atop a rather futuristic-looking bit of architecture.

Rather intrigued, I fly my way in the front door. Strangely, it's eerily empty here. I figured there'd be more people building ridiculous $5,000 Quad-Core QX6850 Core 2 Extreme-based computers. Honestly, I think Second Life could still manage to bring such a rig to its knees.

I wasted no time in hopping on one of their customization stations.. I was able to pick all the components of a PC to build, and watch as it assembled itself to my left. It was rather cool, and, after it was all complete, it offers to take you to a website where you can purchase said configuration.

All in all, this is certainly a unique business angle. It'd be fascinating to find out exactly how many of these Second Life-to-website click-throughs result in actual sales. This may very well become a very large avenue for generation of real-life sales for not just computers, but perhaps automobiles, and other consumer goods. The ability to try something out/view it in a virtual, three-dimensional environment could be instrumental in making such a purchase decision. I find it difficult to criticize Dell's environment simply because of the sheer innovation factor here.

I then meandered on over to IBM's Second Life presence. A search for "IBM" yields tons of results, so, I headed on over to the one simply entitled "IBM", which seems to be an online conference center of sorts, rather than a direct attempt at sales. This is indeed an intriguing prospect, however, it's disappointing that there doesn't seem to be a better means of navigating the island, or an introduction to what the island offers. This could be very helpful.

They've even got this neat little scale-model of the surrounding area.

And, over here, we've got IBM's massive, almost Death-Star-like "Theatre I". This leads me to believe that there are more. Wow.

There are seats there that one can sit in, so, presumably, this is a delivery area for lectures and seminars. I've yet to see anyone, but, then again, I don't imagine most companies would do business in such an area at 11:06 PM.

I find that I'm simply unable to explore the vastness of the IBM complex, let alone a sizable portion of Second Life. While it may be laggy, slow, and inefficient, to be this successful and huge, they must be doing something right. I do prefer Dell's environment simply because of the sheer coolness factor of assembling a virtual 3D representation of a consumer item, then being presented with the opportunity to purchase said item in real life. The most important element here I think is examining these sort of business "experiments" being conducted by these two companies. Whether it's Dell attempting to adapt its direct-sell model to online virtual environments, or IBM attempting to provide a venue for online business meetings, you've got to hand it to these guys for being pioneers. For trying something new. For making that first step forward.

And, now it's time to let my video card cool down. Second Life is making it throw a fit.