In Conversation with Cory Ondrejka, CTO, Linden Lab (makers of SecondLife)

During the Nexus 2007 event organized by The Digital Movement, we caught up with one of the panelists – Cory Ondrejka, Chief Technology Officer of San Francisco-based Linden Lab, creators of the popular virtual reality world, Second Life. Here, he shares with us some of his take on his company’s (ever-growing) baby.
SGE: First, thank you for accepting this interview. Please sell Second Life in one line.
Cory: Second Life is a user-created virtual world where you create, play, connect, and make money.

SGE: What do you think is the appeal of Second Life?
Cory: Despite the emergence of web 2.0, the web is still fundamentally a solo and sequential medium. You post text alone. You surf alone. Even “social” sites are really about passing the megaphone and engaging in sequential monologues more than true dialog. With Second Life, people are able to collaboratively create just about anything they can imagine while building communities and relationships far more like those we create in the real world.

SGE: Do you have psychologists on your team?
Cory: No, although lots of psychologists and social scientists have been using Second Life as a place to learn and to teach.

SGE: Building a community in Second Life is an important feature of virtual worlds. How does Second Life keep in touch with different communities and work with them on their needs and requests?
Cory: We run the SL Views program, which you can read about here. In addition, all the Linden employees attempt to make time to be in world regularly, to interact with residents, and to stay in touch with different parts of the world.

SGE: If I am a young entrepreneur and have created an application for virtual worlds, what is your advice for me in engaging Linden Labs for strategic partnership and collaboration?
Cory: Show us! With the Second Life client open sourced, millions of dollars in Second Life-related contracts floating around, and the ability to connect to the web via the scripting language, you will never have a greater opportunity to take your idea and run with it. Linden Lab generally doesn’t engage in business partnerships, but we are always on the lookout for great projects and teams.

SGE: What do you think will be the next steps in technology to take off in a big way after virtual reality worlds like Second Life?
Cory: Predicting the future is fraught with peril, of course, however it seems pretty clear that as Second Life enables never-before seen levels of creativity and collaboration, it will be generating so much digital content that could also be used in the real world. Over the next few years, fabrication technology is going to reach the point where it is able to help transfer the digital into the real.

SGE: Considering how much such virtual reality worlds like Second Life have spilt over into “real life”, is the term “virtual reality” still a valid concept?
Cory: That is an excellent question! I think that what is happening is that we are redefining virtual reality to just be an extension of the real world. Second Life is communications technology, like the telephone only the medium is interactive experience rather than voice.

SGE: Cory, thank you for spending time to share your thoughts with us.

Links:

- SGE, Interview with Preetam Rai, Educator and Media Socialist, on Web 2.0 companies, culture and virtual worlds in the Asian landscape.
- Bjorn Lee, The Chinese clone of Second Life: HiPiHi
- SGE, E27 IV: User Generated Sessions Videos (check for the one on Virtual Worlds and MMORPGs by FirstMeta)

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