Willard, on Humanist, asked about an article titled, Whatever happened to Second Life? ,
Does this decline in popularity matter? What, do you suppose, does it tell us about VR techniques generally?
According to the article Linden Labs is making more money than ever,
Money is, of course, what makes the world go around – even the virtual ones. So has the Second Life economy suffered the same nervous breakdown as the real-world markets over the past year or so? Amazingly, it appears not.
Linden Labs claims Second Life has turned over more than $1 billion in its six-year history. Nor is it slowing down; quite the opposite in fact. Linden claims the in-world economy grew by a staggering 94% year-on-year from Q2 2008 to Q2 2009.
It sounds like it may be sex that is making money for Linden Labs.
Another answer to the question Willard poses about VR is that now we have tools like the OpenSimulator which allows us to build and adapt virtual worlds on our own server. OpenSimulator is compatible with the Second Life client, but we can customize it to do different things, for example, we can turn it into an authoring environment for an Augmented Reality Game platform. Place your items in virtual space and they show up in the corresponding real space.
There is a discussion about SL and this story at iDC https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2010-January/004138.html . In particular. Simon Biggs points to a report on education and SL (PDF) he wrote.