Making big bucks in 'Second Life'

Philip K. Dick would be proud of The Electric Sheep Company.

The famous science-fiction writer, whose novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the inspiration for the film Blade Runner, wrote about artificial life and alternate realities. Now, Electric Sheep, a 13-employee start-up company in Washington DC, is making a business out of creating spaces entirely in a virtual world.

The year-old company is helping big customers create a presence inside Second Life, the popular virtual world in which people can do or build just about anything they can imagine and socialise with others anywhere in the real world.

Suffice it to say, Electric Sheep is an entirely modern concoction. And while it might seem hard to imagine that corporate types in Fortune 500 companies would ever have the vision to engage in the creation of virtual projects in an adults-only, 3D world where you're just as likely to come across someone looking like a butterfly as someone looking like a human being, that's precisely what is starting to happen.

Last year, for example, Wells Fargo Bank wanted to build an island in Second Life where the bank's young customers could play and learn lessons about financial responsibility. Instead of hiring Linden Lab, the publisher of Second Life, it hired some of the virtual world's users -- though not Electric Sheep.

In fact, said Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, his company has made the decision to leave all such building projects to the Second Life community and focus instead on developing the infrastructure and tools that make such work possible.

That's where Electric Sheep comes in. The company, technically based in Washington DC but operating more often than not in the virtual world, has been booking six-figure deals from members of the Fortune 500 who want to engage their customers/communities, though Electric Sheep CEO Sibley Verbeck would not name any of the corporate clients.

Of course, it's not all corporate customers. Electric Sheep's employees can find themselves hired by a client to customise an island, or what in Second Life is called a 'sim' -- a 16-acre piece of land that users can buy and do with what they like.

Verbeck said Electric Sheep tends to charge around $15,000 for a complete customisation of a sim that includes 'terraforming' the land, constructing buildings and scripting interactivity into objects throughout the space.

One organisation that has hired the company for such a purpose is the New Media Consortium, a nonprofit group consisting of 200 members, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, many other top American universities and many museums.

"We're building an experimental space in Second Life to look at ways a 3D environment can be used to do real work," said Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium, "to bring people together, to have meetings, for knowledge sharing, for learning and to do conferences."

As such, NMC contracted with Electric Sheep to take over the heavy lifting on its sim. That, said Johnson, meant that Electric Sheep terraformed the sim, and is constructing buildings and objects on the island and designing the overall interactive experience that visitors will have there. It's "meant to entice the visitor because it's very, very beautiful," said Johnson, "so Electric Sheep has done a tremendous job of building something very, very rich."

Johnson said that working with Electric Sheep -- which had won a competition for the NMC contract against other Second Life developers -- has been a new kind of experience, especially for a 55-year-old man who isn't used to playing around in futuristic virtual environments.

"For me, the most interesting thing was that... much of our interactions with Electric Sheep took place in Second Life, avatar to avatar," said Johnson. "The social aspects of Second Life were a very interesting part of the project for me because a lot of this took place in that world, even though it was a real-world contract between two companies."

In fact, because Electric Sheep's employees are spread out geographically, its functional work space is a building in Second Life.

"We're a virtual company," said Jerry Paffendorf, Electric Sheep's project director. "We're spatially distributed. Our home base is Sheep Island in Second Life. We meet up in our Sheep Tower. That's our place."

Meanwhile, in addition to working for Fortune 500 companies and institutions like NMC, Electric Sheep has worked on several other projects, including a space called Jibun Life, for the Second Life teens-only environment, which connects classrooms and youth groups around the world in an immersive, 3D environment, and SLE-CERT, a Dartmouth College programme designed to give first-responders in Hanover, New Hampshire a way to practice dealing with urban emergencies.

Of course, not everyone looking to hire someone for project work in Second Life contracts with Electric Sheep.

A Boston company called Vivox, which is developing a VoIP system that can be implemented in virtual worlds, hired a developer called Home Depoz to build it a British-style phone box complete with a phone that can be used to dial any real number in the world.

"We have no artistic talent ourselves whatsoever," said Monty Sharma, Vivox's vice president of marketing. "You want somebody who's actually a 3D artist and second, somebody who's familiar with the modelling tools in Second Life and the behaviours needed to make things happen."

In any case, though Linden Lab is often involved in connecting clients with developers, Paffendorf explained that while Electric Sheep is currently doing some work for Linden Lab, it is totally independent from the Second Life publisher.

And that's just how Linden Lab wants it, even if the success of outfits like Electric Sheep means that the cost of engineers and developers versed in Second Life building and modelling skills goes up.

"I love them," Linden Lab's Rosedale said of Electric Sheep. "They're deadly and they're hiring the best developers... We're competing with them to hire some of the same people. They may end up increasing the salaries of everybody working in Second Life. But I'm so happy to have that competition."