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Friday, 20 April 2007

Second Life Star Trek



Okay, this is just so wrong, but not entirely unexpected. Seems some creative types in the Second Life virtual community have got the drop on Perpetual Entertainment and produced their own Star Trek-styled avatars. (There's quite a lot of Trek stuff in SL, actually, including Trek City and a Trek Museum, and there seems to be a lot of interest in comics and superheroes, too. But on a quick tryout, I didn't see anyone running around in a V for Vendetta mask).

The sequences come as apart of a show posted on Blip.tv that forms a general reveiew of events in Second Life which includes the news that Coke are running a competition among SL residents to design a Coke vending machine.

I gather the commercialisation of Second Life isn't an entirely popular development: although people are happy to design their own cars they'd much rather teleport around SL (because it's quicker) or fly (because it's cooler): so when a company like Toyota provides their latest models inworld, the take up isn't that great. Toyota and other companies would, it appears, be better off, say, going off the wall and instead of creating something based on their real world product, invent something that was way out there -- like a Toyota-branded jet bike -- with minimal branding but just enough so as to be noticed if anyone was interested. It's all about making constructive contributions to what's become a very involved online social community, something I recall only too well from my time working behind the scenes on one of the earlier avatar communities, vzscifi, which was the UK arm of vzones.com.

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