Second Life on an iPhone

by Akela Talamasca Feb 13th 2008 at 10:45AM

Filed under: At a glance, Real life, Video, News items, Second Life, Free-to-play, Mobile, Academic, Virtual worlds

At first glance, this looks like Second Life running on an iPhone, but this is not the case. Instead, it's more of a SL-by-proxy sort of situation, where commands being entered through the iPhone interface are transmitted to an actual SL session running somewhere. There is a slight lag to the proceedings, which any resident of SL will be well familiar with.

Is this tech demo interesting in anything more than an academic way? If you could access SL through an iPhone remotely like this, would it be worth it? What if you could run World of Warcraft like this somehow -- would you? At what point is going mobile more trouble than it's worth?

Tags: going-mobile, iPhone, lag, proxy, second-life, SL-mobile, tech-demo, world-of-warcraft

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Angel said on 3:47PM 2-13-2008

Well, no, I would not. The tiny screen tosses immersion right out the door and I cannot imagine chat or adventuring would be very difficult at best.

I’m all for mobile apps for MMORPGs

Limited chat or perhaps limited crafting, though crafting would require some preparation before going mobile.

Katharine Berry said on 11:37AM 2-13-2008

I really should get around to making the iPhone version of AjaxLife usable and put it up. But I have far too many other things to do - like coursework, revision, and updating the PC version.

Adorable1 said on 11:45AM 2-13-2008

Looked to be about as easy to use as the real Second Life. Kudos!

Porsupah Ree said on 11:52AM 2-13-2008

Absolutely! If the PSP could run a lightweight graphical SL client, I'd certainly take advantage of it.

And I noticed one Bay Area (NTT Labs, IIRC) job last summer mentioning "port the Second Life client to a prototype 4G wireless handset environment" as one of the position's goals..

Toneless Tomba said on 12:48PM 2-13-2008

Web VPN clients been around for years. Second Life could be ran on a lot of mobile devices through these type of clients. The thing about this one is it looks like it is specifically made for Second Life. Kudos. If I'm in a bind this wouldn't be too bad. I couldn't imagine trying to build or even chatting for a long period of time.