Kimberly Rufer-Bach

There are numerous relevant uses of SL for business and education -- most of my clients use it for training simulations, interactive educational quests, and immersive learning environments (such as for learning languages).

The perception of SL as a place just for virtual sex has been weakened as there have been increasing measurable real-world results of successful SL projects. More and more businesspeople and educators are aware that it's possible to use SL for a project with few or no distractions, given proper planning and structure.

Some marketing projects have done well in SL, but they were early or they were carefully adapted to the platform and the community it hosts. Most of the enterprise uses of SL today are not something you'll hear much about, because the companies benefitting from them don't want their competitors noticing their advantage. Educational institutions tend to be far more open about what they're doing in SL, but there you'll usually see brilliant plans whose execution is all too often limited by restrictive budgets. That puts us way ahead of where we were when I started out, though . . . when most educators had to pay for SL projects personally, out of their own pockets. They're getting funding today because those projects showed results.

There was a great reason to build American Apparel in SL. They got loads of coverage in the mainstream and tech media. It was a marketing project and it got a lot of attention . . . a winner. It just wasn't built for inworld Residents, but instead for the press. That was a successful approach for the first real-world companies in SL, but of course it wasn't one that was going to work for any but the first few.

Now businesses and educational institutions are using SL for meetings and classes, prototypes, and immersive training simulations, but that sort of thing was a harder sell. It was easy to get boardmembers at some org to look at some screenshots of something that looked just like a real-world store or classroom and to understand it and its potential. It's was trickier to demonstrate the effectiveness of the actual inworld experiences that are possible, because it takes a while to generate the use cases and whitepapers that you need to convince boards -- some pioneering organizations had to risk being the first.

Condolences to the Lindens who have been laid off, as well as to their friends and colleagues who are carrying on.

Maybe that's because San Mateo is a suburb of San Francisco. San Jose is not. I lived in San Jose, and no one there called it San Francisco. San Jose's tourism and business interests put money and effort into working to differentiate San Jose from San Francisco.

Normally I wouldn't comment on or even notice real-world geographical trivia in an article about a virtual museum that's just a teleport away. But because the Tech won the Linden Prize I checked out their website, and now I'm planning a trip to the brick-n-mortar Tech Museum. So which city it's in makes a difference to me. :)

The San Francisco Bay Area is named for the bay, not the city. There's more info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area if you feel like delving into details in case you should ever find yourself on this side of the planet. :)

Congrats to The Tech!

Wow, lots of great information here. Has anyone else noticed how many of M's doodles look like grids?

Hey, Daman, it has nothing to do with "protecting people from being idiots." It's about companies protecting themselves from having to settle expensive, image-harming nuisance lawsuits.

The "Retard Country" comment was uncalled for and rude. Call it "Country With Some Fraudsters Who Slip and Fall For A Living" or maybe "Lawsuits Pay Better Than Lottery Tickets Country" and you'll get a laugh, instead of offending people you've never met.

I dunno, I think the clouds are pretty cool. And I don't figure it's likely yet at this stage of Second Life's devleopment that anyone's going to be logging in to SL for a weather forecast for everyday use instead of just looking at a 2D Web site or the TV. Not yet. This map has other purposes:

* It's a public relations tool for NOAA. It gets press and makes them visible and approachable.
* It does have educational value. It might get someone interested in meteorology so that they decide to go learn more about things like different sorts of cloud cover. I bet the finished build will include more information or links to info on NOAA's Web site.
* Most important, though, I view NOAA's project as a _research_ project. NOAA (and many other RL organizations with projects in SL now) are pioneering new technology that WILL be more functional than, say, a weather map on a 2D Web site. This map of Aimee's, like the earlier map I built for NOAA, is not where we're headed; it is a necessary step on the way there.

You wouldn't have used the Wright Brothers' first plane for the purposes of practical travel. ;)

Goldurn these young whippersnappers and their custom NOAA backends! Why, back in my day, we got up before dawn to spend hours reading Terms of Service for weather sites by the light of a kerosense lantern. Then we pulled our temperature data from Yahoo Weather's RSS feed using a chain winch, and humped it by muleback up the Cliffs of Meteroa to an animated numerical display on a good old-fashioned weather map. And that was before we chopped the cow, milked the wood, and walked to school ten miles through the snow, uphill both ways!

*shakes cane menacingly, then totters off to script a drool cup and an ear horn*

Wow, that looks fantastic! It's great to see NOAA continuing development of my company's weather map after the contest. Nice work, Aimee. :)