Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about Second Life is that this metaverse , or one like it , could set the tone for the future of online media convergence.

“I think (Second Life )’s going to be very important to the Internet in the next five years or so,” Au said. “There’s an argument that something like Second Life will be the next Internet. The web has only been commercially in use since about 1995. There are a lot of things you can’t do on a 2-D web that you can do on a 3-D web.”

What things, you might ask?

“What’s new about Second Life for architects is that they can build a building,” Heider said, “and then see how people congregate with the space, how people walked through the building.”

Au added, “If you want to buy furniture for your house and look at configurations of what it looks like and how it will fit in your house from different angles.”

Martinez noted, “If I wanted to go to the Second Life version of amazon.com and literally go around and browse a virtual bookstore, that would be neat.”

Tech consultancy company Gartner, whose “Hype Cycle” has measured Second Life adoption, has predicted that 80 percent of active Internet users will be in non-gaming virtual worlds like Second Life by the end of 2011. While Martinez doesn’t really care to use Second Life himself, he said he can easily see something like the virtual world becoming the next phase of media.

“The more (a product) enables the average person to do something they’re already doing but (makes it) easier, then more people will get them. It’s about convenience.”

Au added, “It seems like people are developing more stuff (on Second Life ) to engage with the outside world. The software is open source, so there’s already an access program from Second Life to the Web that a teenage kid made…and there’s a program to access Second Life through your Nintendo Wii.”

Second Life has already gained enough mainstream popularity for an international press service, Reuters, to set up its own “bureau” for the virtual world with an embedded beat reporter, Adam Pasick , who spends four hours a day there finding unique stories and covering the world’s business angles.

“It is really fertile ground for reporting,” Pasick said in an interview with Reuters. “There is so much change going on. (Second Life ) is growing at 20 percent a month.

“There are so many interesting questions about how a virtual world behaves. There is a lot of reporting to do where the virtual world meets the real world.”

Heider added, “When you go see a movie, you start empathizing with the main character, so you kind of become the main character. Second Life is similar because there’s all these things that happen, except that you write the dialogue and you decide what’s going to happen next.

“I can watch an episode 100 times and it’s always going to end the same way, but in Second Life , it’s never going to end the same way.”