Residents of have spent one billion hours in this digital world. Now founder Philip Rosedale has plans to push the concept much further in a new virtual venture.
The populations and economies of virtual worlds are growing rapidly. How much bigger will they get?
They are still in their infancy. My expectation is we will see a web-scale usage fairly soon, meaning 1 billion people. Currently some 250,000 people use Second Life every day. I expect that to grow by three orders of magnitude. I think the total GDP of virtual worlds will catch up with real-world GDP over the next 20 to 30 years.
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Yet many people are hostile to the notion of virtual worlds.
A lot of human interest, activity, creativity, and ultimately money and commerce, are moving into virtual worlds. I think people find that level of disruption to the way things work frightening and upsetting. So denial or being dismissive is natural.
How does spending a lot of time in virtual worlds affect people psychologically?
As an avatar it is more likely that you鈥檒l do something unusual that you might have thought about but not wanted to try in the real world. So you鈥檙e more likely to change your real-world life in a positive or aspirational way.
You have spoken about virtual worlds as being the next incarnation of the internet, or web 3.0. What do you mean?
The web today does not optimise for human behaviour. When we use it we are usually alone and it is not live. In a Second Life store you can see other people, sit with and talk to them. I envisage we will move a lot of what we are doing on the internet today into these more lifelike, 3D spaces.
Do we need virtual police and courts to deal with the growth of virtual crime?
Formalised virtual courts will emerge as a result of common law and collective behaviour. I think big groups will band together and set up their own courts to decide whether to let people enter their property. Being restricted by the judgement of one鈥檚 peers will have material, social and economic consequences and, therefore, the force of law.
How do you respond to traders who claim you have not done enough to protect the trademarks and copyrights on virtual goods?
Fundamentally there鈥檚 a greater degree of accountability and ownership in Second Life than there is in the real world. Any piece of content can have the name of its owner and creator permanently burned into it. However, the virtual world as a whole will have to work out how ownership is going to work. As a company and platform creator we are only a part of that discussion.
You鈥檝e announced that you are stepping down from running Second Life. What are your plans?
At Linden we have more meetings within Second Life than in the physical reality. I鈥檒l be launching a new company this year that takes the concept of virtual life a lot further. I鈥檓 looking at what else we can digitise. How can we evolve human experience?
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Philip Rosedale set up the company Linden Lab in San Francisco in 1999, which launched virtual world Second Life. Residents interact with each other through their avatars
