A Virtual Reality

Remember the computer game The Age of Empires, where you could build rudimentary houses and fight against other tribes to protect your home town? I'm sure more than one of you thought to yourself, "wow, what if we could build real houses on the computer?!" Well, now you can. Of course this also revolves around the definition of "real."

Second life is a 3-D virtual world on the internet developed by Linden Research Inc. "A downloadable client program called the Second Life Viewer enables its users, called "residents", to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another," (Wikipedia).

When you enter "the world," you meet a vast number of people, have access to numerous entertainment sources, and can find land to build a house or start a business! "The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world unit-of-trade, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online Linden Dollar exchanges," (secondlife.com)

We've reached this far. How far away are robots? How far away are we from creating more virtual realities?How far away are we from making second life a reality as is defined today?

You tell me.