3pointD.com

I had a brief visit with Second Life resident epredator Potato today (that’s him in the audience with me above) at what is currently »the main court« of the French Open tennis tournament in Second Life. epred, of course, is the SL avatar of IBM metaverse evangelist Ian Hughes, whose virtual Wimbledon of about a year ago was more or less responsible for galvanizing IBM’s attention to virtual worlds and 3D technologies. The Roland Garros version of the build does the same shot-for-shot replication of live matches as epredator’s original Wimbledon, but uses SL’s physics engine to pitch the ball back and forth across the net. You can also “play” the points, or at least view them from the player’s-eye-view, which is a nice touch. Walker took to the court with his golf club, which you can see after the jump.

More on IBM’s tennis build after this pic of Walker returning a smash with his golf club:

The build does for tennis what other SL builds have done for media and sporting events: it makes them more social and interactive, taking advantage of the SL environment to bring new aspects to the experience of viewing an event like a tennis tournament. “This is about exploring how we extend the tennis experience at the sports events we sponsor as IT partners,” epred told me. “We use the same data and the same services [as on the Web site] to target the metaverse so that it can act as a hub for tennis fans to meet and see the data. It’s much more engaging than a one-person Web page. If you were browsing the French Open Web site and I was too, we would not be having a conversation about it. This is putting people in as content.”

Of course, some recent Web apps such as me.dium do let you have a conversation while browsing a Web site. Me.dium, of course, is a very lo-fi experience next to Second Life. Not only does an app like me.dium not provide the interactability, but the quality of presence — being able to sit two seats away from the epredator in the stands, for instance — is not part of the experience either.

IBM will continue to add features to its tennis builds in Second Life, and plans more goodies for the 2007 Wimbledon tournament, coming up around June 25. What I’d like to see is a tennis game that residents could actually play. SL’s clunky physics would mean that it would have to be more or less a version of Pong dressed up as tennis, but that’s all right with me. In any case, it will be interesting to see where IBM takes this. And also to see how soon they reach the limits of what can be done in Second Life.