Liverpool's 40,000 virtual visitors a day - it's Second Life

Oct 23 2007 Emma Pinch

IT’S sunset over central Liverpool. Only a couple of people are milling about in Mathew Street, but the pavements are spotless and the weather picture-perfect.

Revellers are young, slender, daringly dressed and, save for the occasional violent spin or four- foot lurch into mid-air, are noticeably well behaved.

Welcome to Liverpool in Second Life. For those still chained to a plodding existence in real life (RL) it’s a brave new world of personal re-invention.

For a mere $9.95 a month, you can peel back years, drop pounds, live by the beach and assume a glamorous movie-star name, like Lovenkraft or Liotta.

A cross between MySpace and PlayStation’s CGI-style Sims characters, Second Life is a vast, sprawling, explorable universe with streets, buildings and oceans. It’s a home more than 9m people have chosen, with its own currency – the Linden dollar ($400 Linden dollars to £1) named after the San Fransciso-based techno-laboratory where it was formulated.

It is peopled by avatars – from the Sanskrit avatara, meaning incarnation – which can walk and talk (via a keyboard), buy food, drink and clothes, and have all manner of relations with each other.

With real estate in the metaverse limited only by the imagination of its inhabitants, RL businesses are finding it a cheap place to set up camp, with private islands going at US$1,675 plus US$295 per month. IBM has an employee orientation island, and universities such as Harvard and University College Dublin have opened virtual classrooms there.

And lovingly recreated, megabyte by megabyte, is a virtual Liverpool, replete with bustling bars and legendary landmarks, and attracting thousands of visitors every day from all over the globe.

It is the brainchild of Liverpool-based digital marketing company Creative Cultures, which spotted an opportunity to market the city to a new audience.

It started a year ago when mature student Michael Roche set himself the challenge of creating a virtual Cavern as part of a portfolio for a Fine Arts degree.

“I wanted to create a faithful representation of Mathew Street as I remembered it from 1962,” says Michael. “I’m in a band and was always getting asked where The Cavern was, so I went to Picton Library to get plans of Mathew Street, and it showed number eight Mathew Street.

“I wanted to create it exactly as you saw in photos of the time.”

He joined up with Creative Cultures, who had been asked by Warner and EMI to find out about creating Second Life venues for artists, to form Live From . . . Liverpool. Rather than create individual “islands” for venues, they decided to cash in on Liverpool’s strong global brand and build a virtual city. It is not geographic, but avatars can explore it on foot, passing The Liver Buildings, and even Sefton Park’s palm house and Speke Hall, and visit nightclubs like Cream and Barfly.

The site is proving a massive hit around the world. It averages 40,000 visitors per day with each spending an average 53 minutes in there, making it the top city to visit in the whole of Second Life.

Its creators want to bring on board companies from round the city to create a dazzling line-up of entertainment venues, art galleries and business facilities, for on-line conferences. The possibilities for 2008 are staggering.

“People want to go to places with things to do and people like talking to people, just like in real life,” says Chris.

“What there will be soon is all of the Cavern Quarter and we hope to do a portion of Seel Street too, and the area behind it with the Jacaranda, Zanzibar and the Blue Angel, and we want to forge links with the Liverpool Culture Company.”

Shopping is also on the radar.

“We would like to do the Bold Street project and the little independent shops,” says Chris. “Adidas are already doing this. You buy an Adidas T-shirt for your avatar and you get a voucher for Adidas in RL.

“It is a way to widen the appeal of Liverpool. Someone from Argentina can come to Second Life and can have a much broader idea of the city than just going to a website.”

There is currently about one live concert per week in virtual Liverpool, where a band in a studio “streams” its performance into a bar or club to a live audience. The Wombats are scheduled to play at Barfly, and some 12,000 people have entered a competition to be there when they do.

So how does a night in virtual Liverpool compare with the real thing? No waiting round for people to get ready, queuing for a taxi home, or standing around in heels.

Chris says: “You can get to meet people who are not necessarily people you would meet, and you get exciting entertainment that you don’t have to pay £15 to see, and you might just enjoy it.

“Maybe the atmosphere isn’t as good,” acknowledges Chris. “But if you can’t get to the Mathew Street festival, for example, you get some sort of sense of what it’s like.”

According to Professor Madjid Merabti, director of the School of Computing and Maths at John Moore’s university, such limitations could soon be a thing of the past.

Images taken from the millions of security and safety cameras and satellites could be employed to make Second Life and gaming a far more realistic experience.

“We have gone from old media and traditional ways of working to blurring between the virtual and the real,” he says.

“At the moment, avatars don’t look like people and the streets look computer-generated. But there is no reason why you can’t, from your home, be in the real streets in a virtual way and go on a real-time tour of Liverpool using surveillance cameras police use.

“The challenge is adding emotions to avatars. It’s a way off but you can do some of this. We are looking at the changes of people’s faces that you don’t consciously notice, such as when it is hot.”

But such advances come with their own dangers. The sociological impact, says Prof Madjid Merabti could be that people blurred the real with the virtual.

It could already be happening.

A 47-year-old factory worker is currently accused of shooting dead a 22-year-old male colleague in New York – after the former apparently had Second Life romance with a woman who went on to have a cyber-affair with the latter.

“On the internet, people feel emboldened to do more than they would under normal constraints,” said Prof Merabti. “You don’t see the consequences of your actions. It’s similar to how people address others when they email.

“In 25 years’ time, the danger is that there is no need to leave your house.

“There’s no need, for example, to go to the pub when you can live in Second Life, and so when you do go out of the house you interact with real people the way you would in the virtual world. Society is built on manners and certain morals, so that could pose a problem.”

Space bar and micro chips? Or wine bar and bag of chips? It’s an exciting new world, but on Saturday night, the old one will do.

INSIDE SECOND LIFE LIVERPOOL > > >