Virtually There

"With the tourism boards of Ireland and the Netherlands setting up shop in Second Life, Ivor Tossell wonders if visits to the online world can entice tourists to actually board a plane and go".

IVOR TOSSELL

Special to The Globe and Mail

November 14, 2007 at 8:51 AM EST

"In Second Life - a place where people can frequently be found without underpants - nightclubs act as chat rooms with a visual twist. This particular establishment, a popular pub called the Blarney Stone, was set up by Tourism Ireland, but virtual-world ventures are starting to pop up at the behest of destinations around the world in a bid to attract real-life tourists."

"Mitham points to the Mexican tourist board's replica of Chichen Itza in Second Life. The board built the attraction in part to promote its bid to have the ancient ruins added to the list of the New 7 Wonders of the World.



"I'd certainly never heard of Chichen Itza myself before entering Second Life," he says.""

"I would be shocked if a lot of people visited virtual Dublin then decided they had to go to Dublin," says Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and the author of The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse, a book that chronicles his time as the editor of the virtual world's in-house newspaper.

Ludlow says that, for the moment, virtual versions of real-life destinations have the qualities of simulacra - Disneyland-like imitations that don't necessarily evoke the real thing.

"If you have a simulacrum of Venice in Las Vegas, for example, I don't know that that makes you want to go to Venice in the same way as a travel brochure does."

A Second Life simulation that can accommodate a few dozen patrons at once won't reach nearly as many eyeballs as a brochure, Ludlow points out. "

(I'm not related to Peter Ludlow..haha)

Good article. Wonder what the SL Herald is like?

~Bryn