[Image: The Second Life Obama for President Headquarters. PHOTO: Dann Sklarew] “… Immersion: These days immersion is mainly found among resident whose SL behaviors emphasizes strong roleplay. In SL each resident have a profile. On one of the pages in this you can tell others about some real life facts about yourself; even show a picture. People who tend towards immersion will rarely show any information there. When doing my interviews I used both Skype voice chat and SL’s typed chat. I did not manage to get anyone who was leaning strongly towards immersion to agree to a voice chat conversation.

Overall there is a sense that “What happens in SL stays in SL” as someone put it the SLCC 06 recently. Your SL and RL identity are two different sides of you that should not mix; indeed the name Second Life more than hints at this. This separation of the two gives you the freedom to live your second life in a way that you might not feel able to do in your first life…

Augmentation - I think the augmentation view slowly developed (and is being developed) as the possibilities and limitations of SL became clear to more people. Mitch Kapor described in his keynote at the SLCC how watching Susanne Vega perform live in SL [See write-up of the Vega event at http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/08/nwntv_the_secon.html] had made him realize that we have to stop thinking about SL and RL as different spaces. Such realizations are at the core of this philosophy.

SL adds things like real-time spatial design tools & a stronger sense of presence through avatarization in 3D space to the existing social software on the 2D internet. In a sense you could metaphorically call SL Wiki 2.0. SL is also related to games but removes the artificial constraints on creativity that these impose. Games such as World of Warcraft cannot allow its players to create anything they could imagine because of the belief it would upset necessary balances and ruin the game… Basically open standards will let more people carry the burden (or have a piece of the pie) as SL grows. Cory Ondrejka’s talk at this year’s SLCC was all about open APIs, which sends some clear signals about LL intentions.

People that lean towards augmentation will be happy to see SL’s continued orientation towards the 2D web…

Room for both? - I think the shift from Immersion towards Augmentation during SL’s relatively short life span has been the result of the ongoing conversation between LL and the residents…” Immersion vs. Augmentation by Henrik Bennetsen. Last Edited on December 7th 2006.