Second life gets a new lease on cyberlife

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Companies such as IBM and Northrup Grumman have warmed to the idea of holding virtual meetings or training sessions on the web at considerable savings. Even the military and some police use it.

When American soldiers and police officers from across the U.S. want to learn how to operate Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Cutlass bomb disposal robot, they go to the military contractor's secure Space Park installation.

But they don't have to jump in a car or hop on a plane to get there. That's because Space Park exists only in cyberspace, or more specifically, in the computer-generated world called Second Life.

Virtual reality "is not a fly-by-night technology. It's not a passing fad," says Matt Furman, a Northrop Grumman software developer who helped build Space Park, where customers can spend hours training.

Launched in 2003, Second Life burst onto the scene as an escapist's three-dimensional domain where colorful avatars -- digital alter egos that users create -- could travel and socialize with other "residents." But it hasn't lived up to the early hype among consumers and marketers.

IBM is among the corporations that have used Second Life to create venues where employees can gather.

Second Life averages about one million monthly users, a small number compared with other online services like social-networking site Facebook Inc.

But Second Life is getting a renewed lease on life as a setting for trade shows, employee meetings and other corporate events for the likes of Northrop Grumman, Cigna Corp., Intel Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co.

Linden Research Inc., the San Francisco company behind Second Life, is targeting business users with new products and services, including a feature that will let users call into virtual meetings from their cellphones. It is also testing hardware that companies can plug into their computer networks to create private virtual venues.

Such uses are a departure from Second Life's initial corporate appeal. Initially Second Life attracted the likes of Nike Inc. and Coca-Cola Co., which saw the three-dimensional world as a digital marketing test bed.

Nissan Motor Co., for example, built a virtual vending machine that dispensed cars that avatars could test drive, or even fly. But interest began to wane, Nissan says, and it pulled out of Second Life last year. "There were a lot of things competing for our marketing dollars," a spokesman says.

The marketers are being replaced by corporations that are using Second Life to host virtual conferences for employees or business partners.

Few have jumped in as deeply as International Business Machines Corp. Last year, IBM hosted an annual gathering of its leading thinkers in Second Life. The October event would have otherwise been scaled back because of the recession.

The three-day event, which peaked at about 250 concurrent users, helped demonstrate the promise of virtual reality to many IBMers who were still doubtful, says Neil Katz, one of IBM's distinguished engineers.

"We turned hard skeptics into skeptics and skeptics into true believers," he says, noting the venues have since been used for other IBM events....