Archive notice: This article was originally published on December 8, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The new web avatar not only brings its appearance and outfit from Second Life®; it is also fully animated and can wave, laugh and dance. Taking a Second Life® avatar out onto the web is very simple: users navigate in Second Life® to the weblin house, recognizable by its green roof, in New Berlin near the tower at Alexanderplatz. The exact address is New Berlin 221, 73, 32 (PG).
Alternatively, the weblin house can be reached directly at:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/New%20Berlin/200/93/31
The house contains two rooms, the foyer and the photo studio. In the foyer, visitors first pay one Linden Dollar at the till, which is immediately refunded.
They then enter the studio, where Paule the photographer is waiting. Users simply step onto the stage in front of the camera and start. Recording all the animations takes only a few minutes. A column on the left shows how much recording time remains. At the end of the data transfer, the user receives a link to the weblin website. Users who already have a weblin account can then use their Second Life® avatar as a weblin avatar. Users without a weblin account receive the weblin client as a free download and can immediately explore the World Wide Web with their Second Life® character.
Christine Stumpf, one of weblin’s founders, explained the project’s background: “Weblin is the first ‘layered’ virtual world—that is, a meta-level above the already existing largest virtual world, the internet. With weblin Gate, we are connecting virtual worlds for the first time: Second Life and the web.”
Weblin Gate and the Second Life® photo studio were created in collaboration with the Berlin-based PrimForge team (http://primforge.com).
weblin is a web-based virtual world from zweitgeist GmbH that enables innovative forms of communication. Each user is represented by a virtual alter ego—their weblin avatar—on the website currently being visited and can see other visitors who are there at the same time. Weblin is the simplest form to date of experiencing the web as a virtual world and has more than one million users worldwide. One click is enough to begin a conversation with another avatar. weblin works on all websites, including MySpace, MSN, Google, eBay and Wer-kennt-wen.de, bringing together people with the same preferences, interests and needs. Weblin is a completely user-driven product that overturns the balance of power governing freedom of speech on the internet. With weblin, users decide when, where and with whom they talk.
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