copper-robot posts

Welcome to The Virtual Whirl, a new weekly Massively column covering virtual environments generally. The term 'virtual world' is slowly seeing less use, being supplanted by the more general 'virtual environment', but the world term still has a fair bit of life left in it.

Virtual environments covers a whole lot of ground. From William Crowther's original efforts in 1976 that based a game in a virtual version of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, virtual environments have been a part of gaming, artificial intelligence and behavioral research, modeling, telemetry and process control and more.

Nowadays we're seeing Second Life, Blue Mars, There.com, IMVU and others trying to find places in non-game contexts, like content-development and prototyping, publishing and performance, entertainment and social, education and business; efforts that are met with varying amounts of success.

Felicia Day, Jeff Lewis and Sandeep Parikh, three multi-talented stars of hit Web sitcom, The Guild are to appear in Second Life tomorrow evening as guests on Mitch Wagner's popular podcast, Copper Robot. The hit series, The Guild, has charmed a huge audience with its witty sitcom tale of misfits who all represent a guild in a mythical online game.

Rissa Maidstone, COO of Words2Worlds Inc, has prepared avatars for the guests that combine their MMO personas with their atomic appearance. Above you'll see Codex Alchemi, Codex's alter ego. All three will appear in Second Life for the recording of Copper Robot at 6PM US Pacific Time, tomorrow (Sunday 5 April) at the Seaside Theater on World2Worlds Island.

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.