Amber Night

Tour a NOAA facility, complete with submarine tour, oceanographic and climatology demos, and a journey into the eye of a hurricane.  All without leaving your desk.

I'm a little annoyed that I didn't know about this first, being that weather is the real job (and as of today, only job―more on that later) that keeps a roof over my head.

From GamePolitics:

As detailed by the Second Life Insider, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has set up shop within the popular MMO Second Life. The NOAA studies things like climate, weather and, of course, the oceans.

The agency's Second Life hangout is an island called Meteroa on which players can try out fully interactive demos of ocean and weather topics. These include a marine life tour via submarine or a checking out a pair of tsunami simulators.

There is also a real-time temperature map powered by Yahoo, an airplane excursion into the eye of a hurricane, and a realistic look at a melting glacier.

Second Life (or more specifically, Second Life players) takes a lot of crap from more "serious gamers," but this is an example of one of the things I love about SL.  It takes the concept of player-created content to an entirely new level.  It's a taste of what kinds of imaginative content could be created in more mainstream games, if only developers would get over the idea that they need to control every single aspect of the worlds they create.

Kudos to my colleagues over at NOAA for doing this.  You guys rock.

(And if that floats your boat, you may want to check out Laukosargas Svarog's virtual ecosystem.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 6:04 am and is filed under MMOs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.