It was indeed an interesting meeting with Susanne Piët in Club 11. We discussed the similarities, or rather differences between virtual and real life experiences. And as Albert Boswijk mentioned in his report on that meeting on June 4th, Susanne stated that the key difference between the both kind of experiences is the presence or lack of physical risk: there is no physical danger online.

OurVirtualHolland
Recently Martijn van Santen (managing director Usual Suspects) and I went to ING for a meeting with Wichert van Engelen, head of innovation at ING retail. One of the projects he initiated is OurVirtualHolland. OurVirtualHolland is a virtual copy of The Netherlands in Second Life. At this moment you can visit the Rijksmuseum there, take a bike and cycle around or see a copy of the Erasmus Bridge.
I was attracted to this initiative when I saw the way they celebrated Queensday. There was a boat that cruised on the Maas River with the people who felt the need of celebrating Queensday in a Dutch atmosphere while they were (probably) not able to do it in the real world. Wichert’s avatar did a short speech there and when they were close to the Erasmus Bridge they released a few orange balloons.

But the thing that stroke me was the fact that the same event was taking place simultaneously in the real world; a boat was cruising towards the Erasmus bridge filled with (real) people who released (real) balloons!

The second life virtual reality: a study
David de Nood en Jelle Attema made a study (in Dutch) called “Second Life; the second life of virtual reality” (EPN, October 2006, www.repn.net) in which they focussed on the results of the fusion of virtual and physical reality in the fields of economy, law and wellbeing through research for the new possibilities this fusion offers our society.

They mentioned the following (and more) in their report:

• “Because of the fact that some visitors spent so much time in virtual worlds, for their psychic well being and their economic status they will become partly dependent of their success and contacts in these virtual worlds”.
• “A frequently mentioned motivation of visiting Second Life is the fact that people can make friends and experience things that wouldn’t be possible in normal life”
• “It seems like Second Life has a therapeutically effect on people without many friends: when they spent more hours on Second Life, they will feel happier in the physical world”.
• “Interviews we did by telephone showed that self-help group sessions take place in Second Life and that these sessions do have a therapeutically effect on the participants”.

The term ‘social skills’ in Second Life gets a total new meaning, how are you to send physical signals in Second Life? De Nood et al.: “In a visual and textual controlled world such as Second Life, social skills can also mean ‘read between the lines better’ or ‘being able to create a better physical appearance’.” We all know that many avatars look much better than the people behind it…

Copying the real world
How interested though, we are not yet ready for experiencing the unknown. Take transportation in Second Life for instance. There are no physical laws such as gravity so everybody can just fly around, something we always dreamt of. Funny enough, a lot of people prefer to walk or cycle, since we are used to it and we do not really know how to explore the world from the sky. Wichert even built bridges and set out cycle routes in OurVirtualHolland that help visitors to discover it. I guess even virtual people are human enough to stick to the familiar things in life since it makes them feel comfortable. Yet.

Other

• Queensady in real life
• Queensday in OurVirtualHolland