By now you have probably heard of Second Life, the enormously popular online “world”. I’ve poked around in it a bit myself, but am such a reclusive old grouch that I haven’t been inclined to hang around much. (One of the things I have found off-putting is the lack of a good audio interface, which has meant that one must communicate by typing — though I understand they’re working on that.) But I can see why it’s doing well; you can do and see and build all sorts of creative things, if you aren’t already worn out from writing code all day long at work, and you can certainly meet all sorts of people, from all over the place. (Well, not all sorts, I suppose: you aren’t, for example, likely to meet many technology-shy, bookish sorts, or blind people, or my mother-in-law, or Sentinalese tribesmen. But you get the idea.)
Anyway, it’s easy to imagine that Second Life would be a nice getaway for folks who are confined in one way or another in their real lives: lighthouse keepers, say, or the endungeoned. Now we find, thanks to today’s Physorg.com newsletter, that Japanese scientists are working on a way to make Second Life available to paraplegics by allowing them to control the user-interface with their thoughts alone.
Learn more here.