Second Life is more than another role-playing virtual world, emphasizing reality over merely moving to the next game level. Animated 3D representations of their human owners, called avatars, hold down jobs, shops at virtual stores, meet other avatars, fly like Superman (okay, it’s not an exact parallel), and buy virtual real estate on “sim” islands.

In a sense, Second Life culture starts where IM chat rooms and other Web 2.0 technology end. I experienced Second Life’s power on a recent shopping trip to Circuit City’s virtual store. Immediately you see the advantages of “living” in this rich multi-media environment and navigating visually, like in the real world, versus descending blindly down URLs in the 2D Web. And unlike a static e-commerce web site, I can interact directly with other visitors, asking questions about what to buy or chatting about the weather, just as I would in a real store.

For contact centers, immersive environments may be the ultimate way to give remote product support while also providing many of the real-time social aspects of shopping that are missing on the Web (and are not at all possible with standard telephony-based ACDs.)

So is there a rabbit hole that connects the Second Life metaverse to the universe we live and work in? There is. Second Life has caught the attention of marketers from companies spending real dollars. Sears, Circuit City, Dell, Toyota, and Amazon are either seriously looking into Second Life or have already established digital store fronts. At this point, forward looking companies see Second Life primarily as a tool for training, product placement, and product testing.

The economics of Second Life—both real and virtual—are complex. To learn more about the business and creative possibilities of Second Life, read the blog by one of SL’s sharpest minds, CMP Media’s John Jainschigg, Director of CMP Metaverse.

Where are contact centers today in relation to this technology? The industry is exploring IVVR (Interactive Voice and Video Response), which brings a degree of multi-media interactivity through video and web pushes to mobile and fixed computing devices. With IVVR, users begin to gain some of SL’s benefits, like speeding through transactions visually instead of waiting for the right voice prompt.

Second Life may just start becoming part of our lives sooner than you think.