Canadian college turns virtual world creation into real business venture

After being the first Canadian college with a virtual campus, in Linden Lab's Second Life, Loyalist College is now starting a commercial venture to help other schools and companies create their own virtual world space.
4/29/2008 5:00:00 AM By: Brian Jackson

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This campus of Belleville, Ont.-based Loyalist College is different from most – it has a disco dance floor in the middle of a shark tank, and students fly to classes hosted on platforms that float in the sky.

What makes sense of this picture is that it isn't Loyalist's real-life campus, but its Second Life campus.

Loyalist was the first Canadian college to build a virtual campus, and teach on it, in the free multi-user 3D environment constructed by San Francisco-based Linden Lab in 2003.

The hilly island that seats the campus isn't completely whimsical.

Resemblance to actual Loyalist buildings was maintained to help students feel comfortable, says Ken Hudson, the head of the college's virtual world design centre.

“It evokes the spirit of where we are in Belleville. But it's also a fantasy landscape on some level," he says."

It's more of a metaphor for our campus.”

Now teaching more than 300 students across four disciplines on their virtual campus, Loyalist remains ahead of other Canadian post-secondary schools that are just now starting to build campuses in Second Life.

But with the virtual world's population growing steadily, and analysts predicting that trend will accelerate over the next three years, interest is building.

Loyalist's college garnered attention from other schools and businesses clamouring for their own virtual presence.

So the college is looking to capitalize on that opportunity by transforming its virtual build department into a commercial venture, Infinite Spaces. They launched in mid-March.

Ohio University's Second Life Campus

“Over the last six months, every week someone asked me if I could build for them,” Hudson says. “We realized at a certain point last year that we had expertise in designing and building spaces in Virtual Worlds that actually work.”

If the prediction from Stamford, Conn.-based consultant firm Gartner Inc. is correct, then businesses like Infinite Spaces could be very busy very soon. The analysts estimate that by the end of 2011, 80 per cent of Internet users and Fortune 500 enterprises will be participating in some type of virtual world.

Second Life itself has grown quickly to reach 13 million unique users, and 1.2 million unique users that have logged in over the past month. The population has been booming since July 2007, says Christopher Keesey, the project manager for Ohio University Without Boundaries.

There are a slew of newer virtual worlds that target younger audiences – such as Mattel's Barbie World, which has attracted millions of subscribers – but Second Life remains the favoured destination for educational pursuits.

Part of that reason is that the world is platform agnostic.

“You can be on a PC, on a Mac, or on Linux,” Keesey says. “Which for higher education is very desirable.”

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