Technology Review: Second Earth

(((Okay, Second Life is getting kind of notorious as a tech journalist's darling, but that article is dazzlingly weird by any standard. It just goes on and on and on.)))

Link: Technology Review: Second Earth.

The map I am standing on belongs to NOAA, and it covers a 12-by-20-meter square of lawn on a large virtual island sustained entirely by servers and software at San Francisco-based Linden Lab, which launched Second Life in 2003. (On the map's scale, my avatar is about 500 kilometers tall, which makes Illinois about three paces across.) Corbin, who's on a personal mission to incorporate 3-D tools like this one into the science curriculum at Denver, paid ­Linden Lab for the island so that he could assemble exhibits demonstrating to the faculty how such tools might be used pedagogically. "Every student at DU is required to have a laptop," he says. "But how many of them are just messaging one another in class?" A few more science students might learn something if they could walk inside a weather map, he reasons....