Project details
Client name La Boniquita
Project date Since 2006
Project responsibilities Founder, owner
Project description
So what does a graphic designer do when he is not saving the world with graphics? Believe it or not I am one of the founders and owners of a latin nightclub, and not any latin nightclub but the La Boniquita. This nightclub is located inside the virtual world of Second Life and has been running there since 2006.
The sim wide venue boasts a wide variety of leisure and entertainment forms. DJs playing music 24/7, concert stage, a pool area, department stores, beach party area, wedding venue area, lighthouse, secret mermaid castle and a romantic lagoon. Concerts almost every other weekend with well known artists such as Agae, Ceci Dover, Aragon Ducrot, Katia Keres and Samm Qendra. Discover your passion, at the La Boniquita.
Back in 2006 after finishing school I was talking with my computer teacher Owen Kelly at Arcada and he asked me if I had tried Second Life yet? You will need a credit card to register but it is pretty cool, he said. As I was not yet familiar with the world, I decided to give it a try just to see what it was like. I had at school made an essay about another virtual world called Alpha World. In school we also experimented creating our own virtual world called Rosario where the main language was Esperanto. I could notice straight away how these other worlds were very crude compared to Second Life.
In Second Life the user interface is a lot more developed and basic things like walking around the world was seamless and extremely easy. In Rosario you needed to ‘teleport’ or reload just passing over onto another block of the world. Also building inside Second Life is quite easy once you get the hang of it. The virtual economy in Second Life is fundamentally based on renting land or virtual real-estate or paying for items created or imported in world. The game currency is called Lindens. I found the concept for Second Life very functional and I have been on and off the game for several years. I am still guessing that at some point regular browsers, like Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Edge, will be more like the Second Life viewer. Linden Labs, the creators behind Second Life even tried making the viewer more like a webbrowser at some point but it is far from the same.
Second Life is actually limited to what comes to its core functionality and the in world economy it is based on. This fact will probably be also the end of the world. Linden Labs are already building a new virtual world they call project Sansar. Also rival worlds like Opensims have emerged to challenge the costly land based economy of Second Life. Still with more powerful graphics cards and emerging technologies like Oculus Rift and other VR glasses, I am pretty sure we will see a lot more of these kind of worlds in the future and they will be more available for everyone.