joaoflux / digital / analog / culture

Jan Northoff & Tobias Neisecke are building a New Berlin in Second Life - a replica of the german capital. If it feels a bit small, it is because it is optimized for avatars who are not more than two meters tall. The average avatar in SL is actually quite a bit taller and the two are having a conspiracy theory: The avatars are tall so people need to buy more land. You ever wondered why 512qm seem so small in SL? After all it’s hard to believe that the Lindens got confused because of using the metric system. I was wondering if they may have gradually increased the size.

Anyway, Jan and Tobias are quite a team: Tobias is a doctor who got bored with hospitals and Jan is an artist who got bored with art (I have much sympathy for that). They met only 5 months ago when Tobias ran into Jan’s tiny Berlin Mitte gallery. They are serious about turning New Berlin into a lucrative business and I think that they do have a chance. Lets put it like that: Their plan is much better than other plans of replicating real places in virtual spaces. They also came up with a very cool tool by combining Google Maps and SL’s map: Map In Map, a service that lets you find virtual representations of real places in SL.