By Joelle Seligson

This article was published in Museum News, September/October issue of 2007.

There’s no dress code at the International Spaceflight Museum (ISM). Visitors wishing to blast off on a simulated rocket ride and check out the view from Mars or Mercury can do so wearing ball gowns or bikinis, furry bear costumes or their birthday suits. There’s no code of conduct, either. Guests can walk anywhere, touch anything, shout or catcall or hula dance—even fly up and perch atop one of the museum’s full-scale models of historical spacecrafts.

The only code at ISM is the one behind it. The virtual museum is located on the Spaceport Alpha and Spaceport Bravo islands in Second Life, an Internet-based, three-dimensional virtual world. It was launched in 2003 by California-based Linden Lab, a small, private company founded by the former chief technical officer of RealNetworks in 1999 with a mission to construct “a revolutionary new form of shared experience,” as stated on its website (www.lindenlab.com). There are no objectives to meet; Second Life is not considered a game. Instead, the program allows its users to design fictional humanlike representations of themselves, or “avatars,” that can enter the world to shop, socialize, build houses or lie on the beach—virtually anything that can be done in real life, and then some.

In 4 years, Second Life has welcomed nearly 8 million resident avatars from more than 100 countries—not to mention rampant media attention. Companies including American Apparel, Adidas and IBM have opened Second Life shops. Sweden became the first country to open a Second Life embassy in May. The Wall Street Journal reported in June that businesses are signing into Second Life to conduct job interviews. In July, Art Newspaper stated that Second Life is developing one of the largest art communities on the Internet; that same month, the total circulation of Linden Dollars, Second Life’s currency, was about 2.6 billion, or $9.7 million USD.

Museums—those keepers of the “real”—are becoming hungrier for a piece of the virtual action: A search for “museum” in Second Life’s database in August brought up more than 100 sites. The benefits of this burgeoning technology—such as its ease of use, fantastic graphical possibilities and worldwide social interaction—are exciting enough to have aroused the attention of some high-profile, real-life institutions. Considering the risks, however, of squandered resources, compromised authority and inappropriate activity, those wary about investing the time and money Second Life requires may have good reason.

Perhaps the greatest opportunity Second Life can offer to interested museums is to make the impossible possible. After registering for free at www.secondlife.com users with a little technical know-how can create any 3D object they can code, from clothing to furniture to an opera-singing pet butterfly. (A credit card number is necessary to purchase land or premade items.)

Another French throwback, Virtual Starry Night, lets visitors literally step into 3D renderings of Vincent van Gogh paintings while strolling past replicated structures from the city of Arles. But Marty points to ISM as “absolutely one of the best museums in-world” for its success in virtually achieving the physically unthinkable. Avatars land on Spaceport Alpha within sight of the Rocket Ring, featuring more than 50 true-to-size models of international spacecraft that could never be exhibited in a physical space. Afterward, visitors can board a rocket or teleport—Second Life’s method of instantaneously moving from place to place—to a simulated solar system, making stops at each planet to find out which spacecrafts have landed on Jupiter or the average surface temperature of Uranus (as the informational notecard requests, no jokes about the name). Down below, a stage in the center of the island streams live video from NASA TV on huge projection screens, surrounded by chairs for comfortable virtual viewing.

Like the majority of museums in Second Life, neither of these spaces has any real-life museum connection. ISM is managed by the Spaceflight Museum Planning Group, a collection of space nuts from around the world, while avatar Milan Brynner, who owns and acts as a docent forVirtual Starry Night, notes he is simply one of a team of new media specialists with an art habit.

But even museums that already have a physical presence are using Second Life to expand their reach. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) received major media attention during Thanksgiving week 2006, when an exhibition of digital photographs taken of the crisis in Darfur was projected onto the museum’s exterior. While thousands of passersby are estimated to have seen the display, Chief Information Officer Lawrence Swiader wanted to go beyond the streets of downtown Washington, D.C., with a live Second Life event, not only to have an international scope but also to introduce a social element. “This was a way to get people to come to a virtual showing and see it, but more than that: Second Life allows people to encounter one another in that environment. It’s wholly different from the experience at the [physical] museum,” Swiader explains.

Unlike the thousands that streamed past the images projected onto USHMM’s façade, fewer than 85 avatars were present at the virtual event. This wasn’t due to a lack of interest but a lack of technological development. Second Life is currently only capable of handling a small number of avatars in one location—a serious drawback for museums, which are used to producing programming for hundreds of people in a physical space and hundreds of thousands online. Still, Swiader maintains, “The experience was so good that we can’t judge success solely by numbers of people. . . . I was excited in the end by the quality of interaction, the questions that came from the audience and what came afterward” in terms of discussion among the participants. USHMM has since purchased a private island—meaning the museum governs the land instead of Linden Lab—which it plans to use for further educational programming.

Live, communal events may be the best way for museums to establish themselves in Second Life—and a key reason for doing so. Social interaction is arguably the biggest draw to any Second Life locale; the “Popular Places” menu typically reveals well over 100,000 avatars mingling in one place. As emphasized in “A Second Life for Your Museum,” “The mere fact that someone might visit a gift shop in an SL museum and purchase a t-shirt for their avatar to wear around a virtual world, thereby advertising the fact that they visited a virtual museum, is a good indicator of how strongly visitors value these opportunities for social interaction. Visiting a museum in SL, interacting with other individuals with similar interests . . . and discussing the museum’s artifacts and collections in real time can be a powerful incentive for encouraging museum visits.”

The group behind ISM quickly realized the advantages of social activities and now offers a regular schedule of everything from lectures to jazz nights to massive dance parties on the museum’s grounds. When the Exploratorium in San Francisco became interested in establishing a Second Life presence in January 2006, it took a similar tack. While preparing for an Internet broadcast of a total solar eclipse that March, Director of Web Development Rob Rothfarb and Senior Scientist Paul Doherty set up three virtual SL amphitheaters where avatars could congregate to watch the live event. Though the numbers—between 60 and 70 avatars total—were tiny compared to the countless users who watched the eclipse on various websites, the viewing time of the hour-long event in Second Life was huge in comparison to that on the Web, which averaged seven minutes. “Of the people who came to watch in Second Life, they all stayed for the full hour. They were very engaged, asking questions—they had stuff to do, not just sitting there by themselves looking at a video,” Rothfarb explains.

Inspired by the success of their first Second Life venture, Rothfarb and Doherty established a more permanent space by purchasing an entire island—which normally costs $1,675 USD, though a 50 percent discount is offered to nonprofit organizations—for the Exploratorium’s use. ‘Splo, as the first museum is called, has served as a virtual prototype, allowing staff to experiment with how to make exhibits and attract visitors in preparation for the second, official Exploratorium Second Life museum, opening on an adjacent island in September. ‘Splo features educational exhibits with a more “irreverent view,” according to Rothfarb.

The Exploratorium’s first Second Life venture, ‘Splo, takes a more irreverent view of exhibits—such as with this Leaning Tower of Pie-za, created to celebrate Pi Day.

For example, the museum’s most popular event so far, Pi Day, featured a Leaning Tower of Pie-za—comprised of enormous cherry pies stacked on a teetering angle—and a pi fountain spewing hundreds of 3.14159s. “We educate people but at the same time let them have fun,” Rothfarb says.

As with a physical museum, the “fun factor” is crucial to attracting new visitors in Second Life. ‘Splo takes out advertisements in virtual newspapers—such as Metaverse Messenger, which claims to be Second Life’s most-read publication with around 80,000 copies downloaded each month—to try to draw crowds, but primarily relies on word-of-mouth to increase its audience. Doherty spends time almost daily in the virtual museum, greeting friends, welcoming new guests and tracking the numbers of each. Though these statistics aren’t perfect, he estimates that ‘Splo receives an average of 200 visitors a week, or about 10,000 a year. Compared to the 600,000 annual visitors to the Exploratorium and 23 million to its website, these numbers aren’t impressive—but they are “growing exponentially,” Doherty claims.

More than attracting visitors today, Doherty says his main concerns lie in the future. He believes that Second Life’s three-dimensional platform is a model for the future of the Web. “I am looking forward to the future when the Exploratorium website itself will be a three-dimensional virtual reality museum. I’m gaining tremendous experience about what works in these worlds and what doesn’t,” he asserts. With monthly maintenance fees for island ownership running at nearly $300 USD, “Right now it does not pay for itself, but with the exponential growth I’m seeing even within Second Life—and certainly as the Web goes 3D—then we’ll be way ahead.”

Marty, Twidale and Urban agree with this assessment. Though Second Life is not the first foray into virtual worlds—multiplayer game Dungeons and Dragons was created in 1978—they state that its beginnings closely resemble that of the Web’s early development. “There’s a tremendous parallel to what happened 10 to 15 years ago with the Web. It was hard to say then what sort of investment should be put into it, but it was clear something was going to happen here,” Marty says. “In the next few years, people are going to look to see if there’s a 3D virtual equivalent of your museum somewhere.”

As with the first days of the Web, though, there are dangers involved. This time around, museums don’t seem to fear a decline in visitors to their physical spaces—but questions of legitimacy in a largely uncontrolled environment are as prevalent as ever. Anyone with the time, money and desire can buy real estate and set up a Second Life museum, regardless of whether he or she has any real-life museum experience. “Museums are always places where people can have some semblance of authority behind the information the museum is presenting. Online or in-world, that authority continues to get diluted because you don’t know who’s behind it,” Marty notes. “There’s no longer the easy out of knowing that this information came from this trustworthy source. . . . Now the burden is shifted to the viewer to determine [the authority] for him or herself.”

Determining authority becomes especially difficult when an established museum in real life has no affiliation with its Second Life counterpart, a surprisingly common occurrence. The walls of Second Life’s Art Institute of Chicago, for example, are adorned with digital representations of many of the museum’s most celebrated works, but the physical institute has no knowledge of—let alone relationship with—the virtual one. Second Life’s Museum of Modern Art is dedicated solely to the photography of avatar Emmanuel DeVinna, not the array of artists shown in New York’s MoMA. It takes a careful look around and a few phone calls to make these distinctions, a process probably not undertaken by the average avatar.

Second Life also is home to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Ir Shalom, described as “SL’s Only Jewish City.” Though USHMM was already actively developing its own Second Life space in June, Swiader hadn’t yet heard of this similarly titled museum, which features three levels of black-and-white photographs of Holocaust-era scenes. After taking a look in-world, he said he didn’t see it as a problem. “While I am concerned about some people being confused, I view it to be minor,” Swiader wrote in an e-mail. “It is pretty clear that this wasn’t built by [USHMM]. And the threat of ‘mistaken identity’ exists on the Web, too, with people creating misleading domain names, ‘borrowing’ branded and copyrighted material and worse. So, I am not sure that the problem is a SL problem.”

Control is another issue at play. Museums that shell out enough to buy a private island have some power over who can build or alter their creations. After a few incidents of unauthorized construction and graffiti, ‘Splo implemented an automatic clean-up mechanism, which returns any non-museum items to their owners after a few minutes. However, museums in Mature areas (as opposed to PG areas, where “indecent” content like cursing and nudity is prohibited) have little control over who enters their spaces—or what they do there. Museums must determine whether to regulate and therefore reduce their audiences, or, like the ‘Splo, simply deal with the consequences of welcoming whoever is interested in stopping by. Choosing the latter approach can result in some rather unusual interactions. Based on personal experience, Doherty cautions, “You have to decide what’s going to happen when three nude people show up and start having sex in your museum, and shower you with penises that shout ‘Merry Christmas’ in four languages.”

Is it worth it to deal with these issues—especially when, as with any new technology, there’s no guarantee that Second Life will be the one that lasts? Not everyone agrees that Second Life or any other iteration of a 3D Web is necessarily the wave of the future. Ethan Zuckerman, research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has blogged extensively that Second Life and programs like it are overrated and underproductive. “There’s an implicit message of ‘get on board or be left behind.’ This is a very, very new medium. Anyone who promises that this is the new Web is probably building the bridge too far,” he says.

Museums, already notoriously strapped for resources, should focus more on what’s available now, Zuckerman urges, especially considering what he views as Second Life’s high barriers to entry. “Museums need to do a much better job on the 2D, “flat” Web, [which] is much more accessible to people nowadays than Second Life. Second Life requires extremely high-end hardware; it’s unusable without broadband Internet. The notion that someone would be using Second Life to make a museum more accessible is quite farcical.”

Instead of a main concentration, Second Life should merely be part of an overall digital strategy for museums. Along with expanding their home websites, Zuckerman encourages museums to utilize Web 2.0 applications like Wikipedia as a preferable way to build interaction and conversation around their collections. “I would love for more people to make [art] accessible online,” he says, “but me being able to see it as my cool, dreadlocked avatar doesn’t necessarily make it any better than being able to access it on a website.”

Regardless of other controversies, both Second Life fans and foes seem to agree on an ultimate goal for the program when it comes to museums: to bring people into the physical institutions. Flying through a digital exhibition can be exhilarating, but it doesn’t quite beat the sensation of seeing the individual brushstrokes on an original masterwork or the tactile experiences—like sculpting with black magnetic beach sand—that can only be had at the physical Exploratorium. While hanging out in ‘Splo, Doherty says he asks where his visitors are from, then encourages them to visit their closest hands-on museum. “This is a generation of people who are on computers. I would like to inspire them to get away from their computers and go to a museum,” he says. “I really believe in the experience itself.”

Joelle Seligson is associate editor of Museum News. Her avatar’s name is Museum Writer.