Second Life Proves Itself as a Sandbox for Real-World Engineering

When most people look at Second Life, they see a chaotic mix of anarchic cyberculture and corporate megabranding set into a lush, if almost un-navigable, immersive world. UCI Irvine computer scientist Crista Lopes saw all those things, but she also saw something much simpler—a cheap simulator.

According to the Orange County Register, Lopes and two colleagues had agreed develop software to control a rapid-transit system proposed by Irvine-based startup, Unimodal Inc. The system, called SkyTran, is a solar-powered, magnetic leviatation affair that can run as a network of two-person cars gliding along elevated tracks. Locked out of high-end simulation technology, Lopes and her team turned to Second Life.

Lopez, who’d already done some coding in SL—she and a colleague at University of Texas in Austin built an in-world search tool called SLBrowser—wasn’t sure the physics of Linden’s virtual world were up to the task. “I had no idea if it would work," she told The Register. "I thought there was a 50-50 chance that Second Life would be a good-enough simulation. It turns out that it's very powerful.”

The design process not only proved that Second Life’s physics were sophisticated enough to serve as an inexpensive simulation environment, it also revealed ways to improve the SkyTran design that wouldn’t have been spotted with a traditional CAD (computer assisted design) program:

One was the alignment of the express track directly over the platform, which would be safe, but feels unsafe. The second issue arose from the clear "glass" used in the Second Life pods. Unimodal officials said that, if that were used in a real-life SkyTran pod, it could expose passengers to a fast, repetitive pattern of SkyTran track components moving by, which could produce epileptic seizures in some people.

One of Lopes’ former grad students is working on compiling a version of the Second Life scripting language inside Linux. That way the very same software that Lopes develops for the virtual SkyTran can be easily ported to control a real-world SkyTran.