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SF Fest’s Big Docs: Life 2.0, a Virtual Tour by Tony Reveaux
“Are you Mary?” “Joan! [ShrieK!] It’s so good to really see you!” “Yeh, yeh – I’m that Steve!”
It was the late ’80s, and I was lurking in the shadowy conference room in Sausalito where the Whole Earth Catalog folks were holding a first-ever get-together of active members of the WELL. There was no Internet yet, no Worldwide Web. The WELL began as a dial-up bulletin board system (BBS), and quickly became an ethereal agora for politics, lifestyles and rants. Until that evening, there had been no faces to match the texts.
A Virtual World for compu-generated Amie and Bluntly where earthly cares cannot intrude. Photo Andrew Lauren Prod
Life 2.0: Be What You Design It To Be Now, into the next century with “Life 2.0,” Jason Spingarn-Koff’s documentary of the real and unreal, seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Second Life is an online virtual world created and maintained by San Francisco-based Linden Lab and accessed daily by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.
Unlike the pre-configured terrains of the “World of Warcraft” megaverses, Linden provides a suite of 3D design applications that allows members to create their own interactive avatars, structures, landscapes and environments, which can be shared in different ways. Mouse and keyboard commands move you and activate objects, while realtime Skype carries your dialogs.
Second Life has evolved some pretty wild, and weird scenes, but Spingarn-Koff goes for three deeply meaningful user cases where the virtual and real worlds mirror, merge and mutate.
The Honeymooners Land on Earth Following the paradisiacal “second lives” of Amie and Bluntly, we see how a romantic relationship developed virtually. Their avatars lounge in comfortable resorts, practice sexually-oriented yoga, explore an island, and fly, soaring over lush pastoral landscapes. Then we get the real world scene at the airport where they meet for the first time, embrace and kiss. We see that, unlike most Second Lifers, they actually look like their avatars.
Having separated from her husband, Amie takes Bluntly, who left his wife behind, into her Westchester, N.Y. home as they – at first – are joyfully uniting for a life together. But the gnarly parts of the real world begin to assert themselves. The difficulty of his moving from Canada and finding work, personal frictions, and dealing with her daughter – things go from Fantasy Island to Blendsylvania. At the end Amie reports with chagrin that Bluntly has fled to a job in India, without extending an invitation, real or virtual, to her.
Hustling the Merch in the Virtual Mall From the white middle class of Amie and Bluntly, we are brought to the humble black hood of Detroit, where Asri Falcone lives with her aged parents and working brother. Using her graphic design skills, she has developed a successful career as a virtual merchant, designing and selling lines of fashion from her stores, and also deals in real estate to other Second Lifers. They deal in Linden dollars, which translate to real world cash for Asri.
Of course, her avatar is not the large, middle age woman, but an African American runway model. In a scene in Las Vegas, we see Asri meet for the first “real” time, a woman who is an online colleague and much more plain and plump than her avatar.
Asri experiences a clash of parallel universes when her products are pirated, and she loses her market. She fights back with a copyright lawyer, wins a landmark case validating virtual product copyright, and gets some restitution from the pirate.
You Are My (Little) Shadow We never know his name, but the lean and wiry 30ish man has funneled all his core identity, and total attention, to his Second Life life. His avatar is an 11-year-old girl, “Ayya Aabye.” He insists that it isn’t sexual, but that Ayya allows him to express and reconcile his feelings.
To the beat of dull bubble-gum music we see Ayya walking, going to school, shopping, visiting friends, dancing, and most of all, endless partying. One of Ayya’s friends, another “girl,” is revealed to be the avatar of a middle-aged man who, like the subject, cannot really explain why he is driven to all this.
The camera records his terminally bewildered fiancée, and his brief forays into the outdoor world. But mostly we see him, hour after hour, glued to his keyboard and monitor. He admits that sometimes he gets by with only four to six hours of sleep. It is very creepy to have to witness obsessive-compulsive behavior tied to what otherwise could be a wonderful media entertainment interface.
His sequence ends as he completes a “painful but necessary” termination of the Ayya avatar. Then, less than a week later, he has created another avatar, but now its a young boy.
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Good documentaries not only reveal the present and illuminate the past, they also query the future. “Life 2.0” does all of that. In terms of what’s coming, what we’ve seen here is only the tip of the Titanic’s prow. Perhaps one of the most amazing things about Second Life’s success is how many members have gone through the effort of building objects and environments.
I gave a try at using Linden’s toolset of primitives, and while I am no stranger to Photoshop and other graphics, but I found it as laborious and clumsy as trying AutoCAD Lite. No wonder Asri said that it took her eight months to build and finish her retail shopping complex. The Second Life look is boxy but functional, like video games of ten years ago.
Think if someone like Apple put together a virtual toolkit that was intuitive and easy as the Sims to move, and controlled by touch screen.
There are already some 3D game systems out there, and our obsessive Second Lifers wouldn’t mind the glasses to get that much closer to their avatars. Within a few years there will be easy entry quick-build photorealistic environments and intuitively-driven interaction that will be as welcomely inviting as a Nintendo Wii. We’ll see how we get in – and then out of – that embracing immersive virtual rabbit hole of the very near future. Posted on Jun 03, 2010 - 09:38 PM