San Francisco - Moments after being born in Second Life, Knut Graff rose into the sky, flew through a mountain and headed over an ocean to explore a virtual world that boasts nearly three million inhabitants.
A second later, the neophyte crash landed in the sea. Fortunately, he can breathe underwater.
Virtual society
Continues Below↓Welcome to Second Life - an animated world where real people use proxies, called avatars, to "live" alternate identities in a virtual community, complete with homes, colleges, museums, shopping, dance clubs and even "avatar sex".
It's not a video game. It's a virtual society that parallels real life.
"In Second Life, people live their fantasies, for good or for bad," said Austin Morris of United States-based QT Labs, which specialises in establishing firms in the virtual world.
Unlike video games, the players are the creators, using avatars - which can be animals, people, machines or a combination thereof - to bend the rules of nature using imagination and computer coding capabilities.
Second Life's population has quadrupled since May of last year and continues to boom.
"It is the way the Internet is going to be."
"It's definitely gaining in popularity and doesn't show any sign of stopping," Morris told AFP. "It is the way the Internet is going to be."
Spotting a lucrative market, real corporations are flocking to Second Life to promote brands and sell online. Shops in the virtual world sell clothing, hair, skin and other computer-code fabrications to customise avatars or equip homes bought and sold in the fantasy-realm's "real estate" market.
Simple tools enable residents to use computer codes to create anything from movies and clothing to buildings and space crafts. Residents own what they make and are free to sell their creations.
"It's The Matrix without the bad guys,"
Much like in the real world, people can opt to buy, rather than make, virtual goods.
The currency is the Linden Dollar - named after Second Life's host and creator Linden Labs, a San Francisco firm founded by Philip Rosedale in 1999 - and "in-world" exchanges convert US dollars to Lindens and vice versa.
"It's The Matrix without the bad guys," Second Life marketing director Catherine Smith told AFP, referring to the blockbuster film that depicted human society as a computer-generated illusion.
"The vision was to make it so people could be who they wanted to be and do what they wanted to do without being judged. You could call it a utopian society."
Citizenship is free and the software available at the Second Life website. Linden's formula for success is to sell "land" and then leave residents free to prosper and frolic.
"It shouldn't be a surprise people will find it an interesting thing to do," Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies Internet exchanges, told AFP.
Role-playing is nothing new to human culture and Internet technology, like a masked ball, just offers another "exciting" forum, he said. "People, at low cost, can explore different sides of themselves without risking their real-world identities."
Smith, meanwhile, said "shopping is a very popular activity in Second Life... It's just like any city in the world."
A million dollars in 24 hours
Approximately a million dollars were spent in Second Life in the 24 hours before this story was written, according to Linden.
Some business people have bridged the divide between virtual and real. One, the American Apparel store, has a Second Life outlet where avatars can buy virtual clothing for themselves and have matching real outfits sent to their human creators.
Starwood Hotels, whose brands include Sheraton, Westin, and Le Meridien, tested a planned new hotel design in Second Life.
"It gave us a chance to build the hotel in the virtual world and get real feedback on colors, furniture, the lobby...," Starwood vice president Brian McGuinness told AFP. "We think Second Lifers are early adopters; tech-savvy neo-nomads."
Thousands of people reportedly supplement real-world incomes with cash earned in Second Life, where a woman recently claimed to have become a millionaire by selling virtual real estate through her avatar.
Television news stations have reported from Second Life and the British news agency Reuters opened a virtual bureau there.
Singer Suzanne Vega performed the first in-world concert there. Residents celebrated the end of 2006 with a global snowball fight and online parties.
And Swedish officials this week said Sweden would soon be the first country to establish an embassy in Second Life, as an "information portal" for the Scandinavian country.
Rosedale's own animated proxy routinely hosts "town hall" meetings there.
And residents who break the few rules can be exiled permanently.
Breaking the rules
The more common punishment is temporary banishment to a virtual corn field with only a television airing 1950s US public service announcements, notoriously dull messages "for the public good".
Second Life is accessible anywhere with broadband connections to handle the huge flow of online data.
"It's an amazing experience and I'm blown away by the technology," McGuinness said. "It is nearly as though you are part of a video game. You can lose yourself in believing it is your lifestyle and it is you."
Second Life has also served as a new setting for old world problems, such as litigation and theft.
A suit was filed in a real US state court on behalf of a man whose avatar was ousted and his Second Life land confiscated after Linden Labs concluded he got the property via rigged online auctions.
Hackers broke into Second Life computers last year and stole membership data, raising concerns that the avatars could be stripped of the anonymity that frees them to express their inner selves in the fantasy world.
"It is all uncharted territory," Smith said.
"It is no different than what happened with the Internet in the early 1990s."
