dual reality

Often while in Second Life people come up behind me and ask me, are you playing a game? And of course I say that it is not a game. The closest description I come up with is that it is akin to a 3-D chatting room or forum. Then I think about it and tell them that it is more like a virtual city. Yet this answer also leaves me unsatisfied.

It gets harder when one begins to explain projects that were designed first in the virtual world crossing over into the real world. Two recent projects that make such a cross are the aloft hotel and a garden design competition for a neighborhood of Paris. Still, these projects are being taken and moved into the real world and will lose the connection to the virtual. That is unless you are not experiencing these projects in Dual Reality.


Dual Reality, according to MIT's Media Lab, is "the concept of maintaining two worlds, one virtual and one real, that reflect, influence, and merge into each other by means of deeply embedded sensor/actuator networks." The Boston Globe reports today that Dual Reality technologies are being developed by MIT and Linden Labs to seamlessly weave your real and virtual lives. The equipment in development so far includes eyewear, earpieces, microphones that will constantly move information between the two worlds. Even iphone is apparently getting into the action.

As far as answering what Second Life IS, I do not think I will be able to answer that for a while. It may just be the type of thing that alludes words and, to even, comprehend one may just have to experience it; the new phenomenology for the digital age.

Anyway, it seems that the question designers should be asking is not what Second Life is, but how it will change our cities and how we design interactions with the built environment.