Big Brother tracking comes to Second Life

Students at the University of Arkansas have created a couple of full-sized hospitals inside Second Life to experiment with the use of RFID tagging in medical environments, and ride on flying cats. The idea of the project is to see if delivery and consumption of medical supplies can be tracked around a working hospital if …

[Matthew Smith]

A solution to a problem

Well, the government can't track the users in the real world, because they'll never leave the house. So they get snooped on in Sadville instead. Genius!

Paris - Because shes always welcome to remain stationary in my lap.

[Anonymous Coward]

"the online game without a point"

Isn't that the point of games?? To be frivolous, entertaining, and probably time-wasting in some way?

Feel free to debate the entertaining bit.

[Richard]

Lets see you publish that!

That'll look great at a medical conference. "Ok, now we're going to show you the environment we designed for our research... wait... who let all these furries in here?!?"

I've honestly never seen any point to second life at all. At least WoW, soul destroying electronic heroin though it may be, gives you a goal; stick pointy end of sword in guy, gain experience, steal equipment, stick pointy end of bigger sword in bigger guy, repeat.

< /rant>

[Marvin the Martian]

Great, they're reinventing the NHS!

"Sorry we're out of real medicine, but we've given you 100lindendollars worth of virtual antibiotics. KTnxBy."

[Dave Gomm]

Second life is great because...

It has done more than any other environment to advertise the potential of virtual world technlogy : recruitment fairs, small meetings, large scale conferences, scientific prototyping are just a few of the uses that it has been put to.

Imagine what people could do with more sophisticated design tools, a better security model and some integration with enterprise collaboration tools such as Sametime or Livemeeting or from a social perspective imagine if it was integrated into something like Facebook ?

[Sam]

Security breach

"..right down to the contents of shelves and storerooms."

Including all those nice meds certain folk would like to acquire on a casual no record basis??

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

Rapid prototyping?

Looks good for making small-scale prototypes.

But the robot delivery carts are going to be a problem. We always had to escort ours through the pediatric ward because the kids liked to step in front of it and make it stop and ask them to move.

[Anonymous Coward]

Second life is great because...

It has done more for the cause of flying penii than any other Internet application ever has or ever will.

SL has also provided a wonderful environment for virtual sex, paedos, S&M and a host of other, less savory kinds of sexual depravity.

It's only the normal, sane people that have nothing to find on SL.

[Ned Fowden]

@Cowards & Richard

the point of Secondlife is creativity

there are any number of small things to do within that environment but only those with less than half a wit between them would miss that.

the point of wow is monotony, allowing the unimaginative pleb to enjoy a fantasy world, role play realms with Secondlife require originality, creativity and imagination ... clearly lacking in all posters here of "sl has no point to it"