Business, and Startups, in Second Life

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Curet saved considerable time and money by designing his Noggin Bops on Second Life Michael Kelley

Clients can tour Jon Brouchard's and Kandy Jentz-Brouchard's model homes in Second Life Tim Evans

Westra tested video ads on Second Life for a fraction of what it otherwise would have cost

Avatars ride Perkins' Skytran much as people would in real life Michael Kelley

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While Brouchoud sees this as the future of design, right now it represents only about 10% of his business. Typically, only tech-savvy customers are open to using a virtual world to go through the architectural design process. But Bouchoud says he has attracted some business precisely because he's using Second Life. His Web site contains a section about Second Life, and if someone visiting his site already has an avatar, she can use the site to "teleport," or be redirected to, his "island"—the equivalent of private property—there. Brouchoud uses an island because it can be password-protected, letting him bar access to anyone other than staff and clients, should he wish to do so.

Just as in the real world, real estate in Second Life costs money. Brouchoud paid Linden Labs a $1,600 one-time fee for his island in 2006. He pays $300 in monthly rental fees on top of that, which go to support the servers that host the island. A small parcel of land on the mainland is much cheaper: $7 to $14, plus monthly fees. Brouchoud defrays the cost of his island by renting out much of it to other businesses.

Curet didn't bother to buy private real estate in Second Life, choosing instead to work in a free public space called a sandbox. When other avatars came up to him and asked what he was doing, he simply told them he was creating a new toy. He didn't worry about someone stealing his idea. "I wasn't shy about it," he says. "I knew that to do anything with this design, you would have to have a lot of other things in place in the real world—potential clients, a China factory, knowledge of plastics, access to motors—stuff the average person in Second Life just does not have."

TO THE REAL WORLD

What John Westra and business partner Tom Bush did not have was a lazy $400,000 they figured it would cost to demonstrate their new business idea. Westra already runs a $1.5 million tech consultancy called ProBiz Team in Ada, Mich. Now he and Bush want to create a video ad system using flat screens that can be installed in crowded places such as airports and restaurants. Westra realized the bulk of that money would be spent not on hardware, which is expensive enough, but on carting the system around for demos. And getting permission to run the demos wasn't going to be simple, either. "Can you imagine us going to a major airport or shopping mall and saying, 'Excuse me, we would like to borrow some wall space and set up some communication equipment for the next couple of hours for a demo'?" he asks. "We wouldn't get past the laughter."

In March, Westra started designing a prototype in Second Life. At $250 for an office and $75 a month in rental fees, Westra's costs are minimal. He was able to demonstrate the system in a variety of locations within Second Life: an airport, a shopping mall, restaurants, and bars. Westra says these demos impressed potential investors and customers by giving them a good sense of how the service would actually work. He hopes to launch in the real world by the first quarter of 2009.

For other businesses, the hurdles to real-world prototyping are much higher. Seven-person UniModal Transport Solutions in Irvine, Calif., is trying to build a personal rapid transit system called Skytran. Funded by private investors and a grant from the U.S. Transportation Dept., Skytran is conceived as an energy-efficient personal monorail-like system with pods that seat just one person. While various elements of the technology have been tested in different projects, ceo Chris Perkins knew a real-world prototype was out of the question. So Perkins turned to the computer science department at the University of California at Irvine. Associate Professor Cristina Lopes suggested modeling the design in Second Life on an island owned by her department. "This captured our imagination," says Perkins. "Here's a tool in cyberspace where we could simulate an engineered system and see if it works."

Lopes and her three-person team met weekly with UniModal engineers, trying to understand their designs and the software they wanted to use to control it. She and her team then modeled SkyTran using only the tools available in Second Life (Lopes went beyond the basic design tools and dove into Linden Scripting Language, the programming language that "runs" Second Life). That let the team build a transport system that works pretty much the way a real one would: Avatars get in the pods and ride around a short circular track.

The Second Life experiment has already led to changes in the design. "Lopes' simulation has been useful in discovering problems in virtual reality before anything gets built," says Perkins. Passengers had a disconcerting view of the track from the pods, so now the track is covered. The team also realized that the station housing the pods was too small, and that each individual pod needed some sort of obstacle avoidance feature because, over time, trees could grow over the tracks.

Perkins says the target date for production of the first SkyTran is late 2009, and that his firm is in discussion with a number of municipalities in the U.S. and Europe to install the system. By that time, residents of Second Life could be testing your idea.

Back to BWSmallBiz August/September 2008 Table of Contents

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Eve Tahmincioglu is a contributor to BusinessWeek SmallBiz.