I started playing in the world mainly because I am interested in how a 3D environment can be used to make instant messaging more effective. Where I work, I am almost never working face-to-face with my co-workers. I either talk to them on the phone, exchange e-mails, or chat in IM. This is all well and good, but you lose all those non-verbal cues. In my case, this is especially irritating, because I talk a lot with my hands and want to point at things. One of the features of Second Life is that you can animate your avatar to express emotions, and because you are all in a 3D world, you can gesture.

Right away, I’ve learned that the shift to a 3D world changes things considerably from text chat. For one thing, it quickly becomes second nature to interact with objects and people spatially. As an example, I was talking with someone the other day, and we were talking about his projects in the world. At one point, he said, “if you look over here” and walked over to an object. I knew immediately what he meant, and I didn’t even think about how natural it was until after the conversation was over.

Another more subtle change is that you are more discoverable than in other technologies. What I mean is that you are present at a certain location in the world, and others can see you whether you know them or not. Just as in the real world, if you are standing in front of a shop someone can come up and ask you a question, someone can come up to you in Second Life and talk to you… even if they don’t know you. This is different from all the IM and e-mail technologies, because they require you to know the other person. This sort of thing has happened several times for me, and I’ve even met a couple of friends this way and found out about things I might otherwise have missed.

One final thing to note is that Second Life is much different from other 3D worlds in that the “residents” are given the ability to make things in the world. Bundled as part of the client software are all the tools needed to build anything the world can handle (with the exception of sounds and textures). In fact, most everything in Second Life was created by the residents of the world, and not the company that created Second Life. In this respect (and many others I may get into later), the world is a lot like the early web: everything created by the people using the system… with few barriers. Now, most of us probably remember the early web: it was an odd mixture of interesting and beautiful things right next to total garbage. Second Life is like that too. Some places are amazing and beautiful (the two images below come from one area I’d consider as beautiful), but in some places, you’ll just see a huge wooden block or something else equally trashy.

Anyway, Second Life is an interesting experiment for me, and I imagine I’ll keep playing with it for a while. In case you happen to be in Second Life as well (or plan to be) and want to meet up with me, my name in game is Loraan Fierrens. You can find me in the people tab in the search tool and send me an IM. At the moment, I’m in-world for considerably longer than is probably healthy.

	My avatar in a pretty area called Teal where there are all sorts of tutorials on how to do pretty particle effects. Yes, those are wings, and yes my avatar looks nothing like me. You want to make a big deal about it? Well, do ya?
	Another picture of my avatar in Teal. This time, I’m watching one of the pretty… and ever-so-mesmerizing light shows the owner has created. Something seems to be interesting my avatar over on the left… I’m not sure what it could be.

First, a little while ago, Microsoft brought out a free version of Visual Studio, called Visual Studio Express. C#, C++, J#, and Visual Basic are available, as is an express edition of SQL Server. Now, I’m no fan of Microsoft, but Visual Studio 2005 and .NET are considerably less horrible than some of their old tools (oh, the agony of trying to write robust code in Visual Basic 6!). The express editions are, as you might expect, considerably less full-featured than their professional counter-parts; but they are certainly good enough for students, hobbyists, or just plain messing about. So, if you’ve been thinking you need to learn C# but didn’t want to pay for the full package, this might be a good way to go.

Along the same lines, Microsoft has also released a beta of a simplified game development environment called XNA Game Studio Express. This package plugs into the Visual Studio Express package and allows the student or hobbyist to write games fairly easily using .NET and DirectX. Currently, the games only play under Windows, but they claim the games will be able to run on the XBox 360 by the time the software is finalized. I haven’t played with this last package very much yet, but I can say that what I’ve seen so far would make it relatively easy to build some simple games. You won’t be writing the next Halo using this, but you could still write something pretty neat.

Both of these moves represent something of a shift for Microsoft, I think. It used to be that, except for something like QBasic in the bad old days of DOS, there really was no free software from Microsoft for development. Their tools were always good, but you had to pay for them (and in the case of the professional and enterprise packages, the price could be steep). Now, you can get a decent version of a C# IDE without spending a dime, and you get a game development package for free too. In both cases, Microsoft is lowering the barrier to entry to learning how to work with their tools and libraries. Considering that there are numerous free tools available (Sun’s JDK, the GNU suite, and a plethora of free implementations of various programming languages like Squeak [a personal favorite], Scheme, Common Lisp, etc.), this is a pretty smart move. Now, if you want to learn how to work with the Microsoft stack of software and don’t have a lot of money to spend, there is a path for you where there might not have been one before.