Second Life (SL) is the most popular three-dimensional virtual worlds, something collectively referred to as the ‘metaverse’. In this metaverse, humans in ‘avatars’ interact with each other both socially and economically. The environment is very comparable to what in the gaming world is called MMORPG Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game). Second Life was released to the public in 2003. The population of SL residents (users) started gaining momentum only by the second half of 2006 and now stands at almost 12 million residents.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Once users are online, they take on a different identity altogether, complete with a Second Life name, in the form of an avatar. Second Life is a vast digital continent in which residents meet new people and experience the environment.
Second Life has a strong commerce element running through it. Residents can buy and sell virtual goods, open a nightclub, sell jewelry, become a land speculator, be a witch or magician or even take on different identities. And these include real life businesses providing solutions inside Second Life like Indus Geeks, who are a metaverse development firm developing goodies for SL inhabitants.
For commerce, SL has its own unit-of-trade called Linden Dollar (L$), which can be exchanged with US dollar. Many big corporations have set up their presence in SL like Microsoft, Sun, Intel, AMD, Warner Bros, Adidas, Reebok, Nissan, Toyota, and many more. But then, there are not many Indian companies with presence in SL at the moment but sooner about 20-25 Indian companies are slated to open shop in SL.
Even educational institutions are not behind in being there. Second Life now offers an innovative learning environment in which its participants from around the world can collaborate in real-time and learn from the diverse experiences of faculty and peers through INSEAD. Second Life is planning programs, including MBA, EMBA and Executive Education. In addition to the course offerings, INSEAD also plans to build a research center and a social science research lab on its virtual real estate. Similarly, U21Global launched their island on SL whose idea is to complement the dynamic executive education experience that they provide.
MAKING MONEY ON SL
As a business, you will most probably start by buying land. Land can be acquired by buying it from other residents. You can also acquire land through auctions of newly created land, or simply purchase private, expandable islands. Once you have land, you would want to start building your virtual property - by creating offices, conference rooms, auditoriums, shops, playground, beach, etc. Most likely, you would want to hire the service of metaverse development companies to help you do all this. After this and this is very important - you would need to keep this place alive by organizing activities on a regular basis.
Besides opening shops that sell goodies to the in-world inhabitants, there are various occupations, some of which we mentioned in the beginning of this article, off which users could make some money. Someone going for a job in SL can easily make 500-1000 dollars a month.
The issues in Second Life at the moment are manifold. These include bandwidth related problems like lag time, connection severance, security and privacy issues, in-world infrastructure challenges causing teleports to fail, inventories to disappear and transaction loops to stall, etc. SL is quite exciting but it will take time to actually have a stable one.