The new Second Life virtual world viewer version 2.0 (BETA) now has an interesting feature called "Shared Media". This basically means that any user-created object in Second Life (i.e. a table, a car, or your baseball cap) can display web content (i.e. HTML, Flash, images, movies, and etc.) on any object's surface, and then any avatar inside Second Life can interact with iit.

IIn fact, to create this post, I never left the confines of Second Life...I just created a prim(itive), a wooden cube, resized it to blackboard size, and allowed the iStorya.net forum to be embedded on one of its sides...and voila...


...I'm now using iStorya.net forum from inside Second Life! Thus the iStorya webpage you see there, can be seen by other Second Life avatars/residents, and they can even control the scrolling, or find pages, along with me.

The possibilities of this for collaborative work (i.e. virtual classrooms, virtual meeting/conferences) inside Second Life is immense, considering you can load something like Google Docs, and thus work together with several people all at once, on a document/spreadsheet, etc. while viewing videos, slides and about anything else on the web from inside SL.

Furthermore, devices which used to be "fake" in Second Life, like TV sets and virtual iPods, can now function exactly like TV sets and iPods, all because of shared media. Your Second Life car's stereo can now actually play your favorite tunes while you drive it inworld. Or, you can now update your Facebook status by clicking on your coffee mug in Second Life and type in your FB status there.

For fun, I even attached a prim on my avatar's chest, containing the Wikipedia.org website...the result? My avatar is now a "Walking Wikipedia" hahahaha

-RODION