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Last night I wasted two hours in the “virtual world” Second Life.

I’d looked at it a couple of years ago, when there was a lot of focus from the mainstream media, and within the podcasting community on Second Life. It’s premise is a brilliant one: a virtual world where your avatar can create objects, interact and socialise. A world without boundries - If you want a Ferrari, you can have one… you just need to create it in the virtual world.

Much of the mainstream media focus is on how people have made money out of their virtual creations (by selling on the Ferrari they have created) and the social dynamics of interacting in a virtual world. Second life has it’s own economy; run for the benefit of its creators (of course) but one which the ‘real world’ has taken notice of.

Real-world organsations, from Reuters News Agency to the Swedish Embassy have presences in Second Life and even TV Series, such as CSI:New York have set up zones where people can interact.

When I first looked at Second Life, I started on the standard ‘orientation island’, where you learn the basics of controlling your avatar, editing their appearance and chatting. The biggest problem I had was with the jerkeyness of the display, and the fact that your avatar looks like a gust of wind would blow it over - it was that stiff.

Most of the avatars on ‘Orientation Island’ appeared to be ‘editing appearance’. This is one of the big strengths of Second Life - the amount of control you have over your avatar’s appearance, not just the colour of the hair, but down to how pointy the eyebrows are. Every denizen of Second Life is different - this is a strength, it is also a weakness.

One of the funniest scenes in the South Park episode: “Make Love, not Warcraft” is where Cartman is addressing his troops, and Butters walks up alongside him looking identical. “You Can’t be the Dwarf! I’m the Dwarf! now go change!” is Cartman’s response. In World of Warcraft, there are only a limited amount of variants to each character, which means you can walk down the road and see someone looking identical to you. However, from a programming point of view, this makes sense. With World of Warcraft, all of the character models, textures and mesh information is stored on your local hard-drive. When you walk past someone, the client and the server communicate with information about all the objects in the local environment. On a very simplistic level (and I must stress, I don’t know exactly how World of Warcraft generates its environment) this means that you “see” another avatar, and all the data needed would be: Model: Dwarf, Face:5, Skin tone: 3, Haircut: 1, Armour 216. That is a small amount of data, wheras when SL avatars are generated, the information is a lot more complex, as the mesh information itself needs to be communicated. With the WoW model, the mesh is predefined, which means it is quicker.

The environments themselves are completely dynamic too - again, on the surface, a fantastic idea, but the amount of data involved is incredible, from geometric positions to textures. In World of Warcraft, the blacksmith in one town may be identical to the blacksmith in another town, but it keeps the processing speeds down.

The biggest problem I had with Second life was the speed of the program. My internet connection is not the fastest, and simple movement was incredibly difficult. Even with all of the display settings turned down there was no difference. Half the time, I was moving a grey, unskinned avatar around a nondescript landscape.

When I teleported to a less populated area - Podcast Island (where I was apparently the only one there), the refresh wasn’t so bad, but the areas I did see where so jerky the experience was somewhat hollow.

I think i’ll stick to WoW for now.