erty. Because it’s a virtual world, everybody can get waterfront
property!”) She’d decided not to build a house. (Her neighbor,
whose property we could see when she turned her avatar’s head
with the arrow key, lived in a giant pirate ship.)
Rein loaded a video she’d taken of a concert. An artist had set
up a stage show involving his avatar in front of elaborate lights
and big speakers while he streamed in the real-time sound of his
playing. I tried to grasp why I’d want to have been virtually present at this when I could just watch a video of a live concert later.
“So the difference is that I could be listening to him while he’s
playing and see this avatar at the same time?” I asked.
“Yeah, and your friends, and you’re all — it’s a social setting at
that point, with everybody hearing it at once.”
She talked about the importance of a sense of presence, some-
thing avatars could provide that online chats couldn’t. Though
that presence was often something like a big raccoon with boobs,
it seemed to be a major selling point; UNO’s Johnson had men-
tioned it to me four times.
“For a university, Second Life offers a sense of presence in
the classroom that you can’t get with regular internet courses,”
he’d said. Indeed, when my UNO graduate program had been
interrupted by Hurricane Katrina, I’d had to take all my courses
online, like most students there, and they had been cold, imper-
sonal affairs. “In a chat room, you sort of know where the other
people are who are talking to you, but in a classroom with avatars
you just turn your head and there he or she is. That gives it a
greater sense of community.”
Rein showed me another video, a lecturer giving a talk. People
had gathered on her lawn to watch him speak live. They sat next
to each other, like at a movie in the park, watching the event
stream live on a big screen. They could type messages to each
other to discuss what was going on, and could also type mes-
sages to the lecturer, who would answer them in real life in real
time, in front of both his virtual and physical audiences, the lat-
ter of which was also watching video of the attending avatars.
Thus a lecture for a few dozen in Palo Alto had the potential to
become a massive international salon. In 3-D web, as opposed to
2-D, as Johnson explained it, “The friction of distance is largely
collapsed. It’s the ability to bring people—at least representa-
tions of people—together in space that makes this technology
so appealing.” That is, 3-D web will supplant 2-D web because it
restores a representation of what is usually missing when people
interact online: a shared space. And the possibility of easy rep-
resentation of presence is what could lead to 3-D web also sup-
planting some arenas of 3-D RL.
That presence can be powerful. Though novice Isis Aszke-
naze can barely walk, avatars can, for example, smile, converse,
blush, exercise, and make eye contact. You can make your rep-
resentation reflect your true emotions, or take on faker, more
manipulative or more socially appropriate ones — just like in RL.
“In an online world like Second Life,” writes Wagner James Au
in his book The Making of Second Life, “the emotional intimacy
is . . . enhanced by a visual representation that becomes your
mental picture of the person somewhere out there on another
computer. . . . The interaction is so realistic, so powerful, it can
inspire the full gamut of human emotions, including desire,
rage, and jealousy.” Who among us hasn’t experienced some, if
not all, of these emotions over e-mail? Whether we realize it or
not, aren’t we looking for a human connection every time we
check our inboxes? Researchers at Stanford have shown that
by using visual and behavioral mimicry, avatars can more eas-
ily persuade the humans behind other avatars. Many a real-life
couple has demonstrated that virtual interactions can lead to (or
undo) love. In fall 2008, a British woman sued her husband for
divorce after discovering he was having an affair in Second Life.
