IBM, Second Life and your cell phone

The BBC has an interesting article about mobile web 2.0 things. The last blurb is about IBM's efforts to bridge virtual worlds like Second Life with mobile phones.

From the article:

"IBM's master inventor Zygmunt Lozinski explained his vision does not simply involve accessing Second Life from your phone - it involves using your mobile as a bridge between the virtual world and the real world.

"You have a group of people who use virtual environments like Second Life, and they interact within those environments using tools like instant messaging and chat. But what would happen if you could connect people and objects in a virtual world to real world communication networks? To your mobile phone, to phones at home?

In effect, IBM's model removes the need for people to exist within a virtual world.

"If you're travelling you may not always have good enough connectivity to interact with people in a virtual world, even if you need to. People can communicate irrespective of whether they're in the virtual or real worlds," said Mr Lozinski. "

See also the Reuters article about Comverse porting Second Life.

From Reuters:

“People are spending more and more time in virtual worlds,” Daphna Steinmetz, head of Comverse Innovation Labs, told Reuters in an interview on Thursday. “We want to bring closer the first life and the Second Life.”

The software was developed over the last six months, well before the open-sourcing of the Second Life client, and relies on using a separate PC or server as an intermediary. Comverse, which plans to demonstrate the products at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona next week, has also created an application that allows Second Life to run on IPTV platforms."