Getting started with Second Life

Posted on Tuesday February 19, 2008 by Julian I. Kamil

These past few days I have been greatly occupied with getting into Second Life (SL) for a project that aims to replace some physical collaborative design processes with virtual ones. I have to admit that although I have had an SL avatar on the Linden grid for over a year, I have only logged in and wandered around inworld at most a couple of times and never more — but that has been more because of the lack of available time to explore than the lack of interest. Lucky me, this time I’ve got a chance to do it in the context of a commercial project.

Having been around for about five years, SL is one of the most populated virtual worlds with over 2 million registered users as of January 2007 (and 12 million registered users as of today!). Although the actual percentage of active users is arguable, SL has a healthy virtual economy and community that had produced a real-life millionaire worthy the front page of BusinessWeek and a virtual babe that made it to the list of the Maxim Hot 100. Now, no one can argue with that kind of success, right?

So, to get started, I went ahead and downloaded the latest SL client software from the community downloads page. My laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 with a 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 CPU and 2 GB of RAM running Windows XP, and as it turned out, this machine has enough power to run the client and connect to the grid comfortably. If you do not yet have an avatar, you would need to register and create one through the registration page before running the client software. The registration process is quick, and once completed, you will be able to go inworld immediately with the newly created avatar.

After going through the welcome orientation, one of the first inworld landmarks that you should teleport to is The Shelter, where you could meet other new residents, watch video tutorials, pick up some freebies, and learn a great deal more about the environment. Also, check out the community events calendar to find out what is going on throughout the day. Not to be missed is the official SL blog, where you will find announcements about software updates, blackouts, and other issues.

Welcome to the grid!

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