Last night, after hearing all the hype over the last few months, I tried out Second Life…

I created the character “Wholenut Holsworthy” and, after installing the software, entered the world, adjusted my avatar to look somewhat like me and wandered around for a bit.

So, what’s my impression?

It’s rather mixed to say the least. In some ways it’s really quite advanced, such as the character design. However, the world itself made me think of early virtual reality systems such as SuperScape. It was rather jerky and slow as well, even on my decent games machine. Hmmm…

I think that there’s still a great deal of scope for a replacement, using something like the Half-Life 2 (or even original Half-Life) engine and a large library of pre-loaded textures and forms, combined with a modelling system similar to that in Second Life. Now, add an Elite-style space roaming, trading system, a bit of inter-planetary politics and a dash of Universe generation using the ideas of the “Strong Anthropic Principle”, oh and a tax system to fund it all and I think you just might have an interesting and fun virtual Universe.

P.S. Another thing which took my attention… yes, the sex industry has already populated Second Life.