Forget furry encounters and virtual people glued to unreal fruit machines, members of the iGEM team based at Calgary in Canada have decided to make a real use of the virtual-reality space Second Life. And it looks as though the work by Patrick King and colleagues will make use of the scripting and visualisation features of Second Life as well as the meeting-space environment that most people (as least those that have stayed) use:
"The most often touted feature is that SL can offer a classroom-like environment for people at any distance from one another. While the iGEM Calgary island will make an excellent hangout for idle igemmers the world over, our focus is less on creating a classroom, and more on presenting concepts directly. We want to make it easier for new students to grasp the basics of synthetic biology by making it accessible and interactive. This is where SL's object creation and scripting facilities come into play: we can create anything we want, from molecules to cells to lab equipment, and then make it behave like the real thing."
The environment will not just be for the Calgary team, King writes:
"My number one goal for this project is for it to be useful to others, especially early university or high school students just beginning with iGEM, but also biology students in general, and the public. For it to be useful, it must be used; feedback on the accuracy of our work is essential! I hope that Lindsay Island will be open to the public near the end of the summer, but the real test will not come until iGEM 2010, when we will meet our first batch of fresh students."
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