SL Land Mass Data

Just a few facts for everyone to enjoy:

1. Avatars walk about about 6 mph (9.65 km/h). Assuming no lag, an avatar can walk from one side of a sim to the other side in about 1 minute, 35 seconds.
   
2. Each sim measures 256m x 256m (65,536 sqm). From north to south, a sim is about .159 miles.
   
3. The slmaps.com site states that there are currently 3,952 sims on the main grid
   
4. If we stacked all those sims in a tight square (approx 63 sims on each side), the distance north to south would be 16,128m, or 16 km, or about 10 miles.
   
5. That means it'd take almost 1.5 hours of continually pressing down the "up" arrow on your keyboard for your avatar to get all the way across the fictitious packed-square grid.
   
6. The SL main grid map available at Wikipedia is not perfect (it's the one on display at the ICT Library), BUT it shows that the 3,952 sims are not a neat little square. Instead, they are spread out over a vast "ocean."
   
7. How big is that ocean? How many sims *could* it hold? According to my measurements, if every piece of SL ocean were covered by a sim, there'd be close to 190,280 sims in SL(see note). IF this ever existed, it would instead take the average avatar (walking) almost 10 hours to go from north to south, and 14 hours to go east to west.

Wow... that's big!!

NOTE: This was arrived at by looking at the map in scale. It measures 53.5 cm x 80 cm. Each sim is about .15 cm x. 1.5 cm. > NS = 356 sims x EW 533 sims.

Where is everyone in SL??

A friend recently suggested that every time he's in SL, there is no one around (despite the fact that LL records approx. 444,000 logins per week, which is an average of 63,500 or so per day).
Whenever I log in, there always seems to be between 30K and 55K in-world at the same time (this is up from what... 14K in spring 2006?). Anyway, it seems like a ton of people... so where is everyone??? For those of us who have to on occasion explain things to newcomers and/or naysayers, I did simple math, and it explains things a bit.

Currently, there are 3,952 sims on SL's main grid (http://www.slmaps.com/). This means that if evenly distributed, 50,000 users would result in about 13 users per sim. There are sims/areas that attract many times that number, so the likelihood of finding more than a few green dots in any one location is small. Education builds tend not to attract 'hoi polloi.' Hence, lots of emptiness.

I am not SL's biggest apologist (there are certainly things as an educator that I wish a competitor would come along and fix), but when folks tell me, "SL is boring, " I tell them (with a smile), "So is your course website." Maybe I'm not right 100% of the time, but I've seen a lot of course sites, and looking through them is about as exciting as watching KillDisk zero out a 300GB HDD.

SL MAP: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/Second_Life_map.jpg

The claim of "no one is there" was put forth by Wired magazine, and a lot of journalists have continued stories along this line because it's easy to replicate the results: Go to Second Life, find no one... and find a bunch of companies pulling out en masse (as reported on APM's MarketPlace on 22JAN08). Their criticism is likely valid for the business world, which wants to put product/service ads & content in front of users. If users are mere vapors, then money spent by companies to use SL (which, all things considered, really doesn't chew up their ad budget too much I suspect) might be better used elsewhere.

Anyway - it's easy to be a critic. As an educator, I'm interested in SL not for the bazillion people I can bring to my plot of land, but what it means for the couple dozen students in my class.

Shameless Plug for Community Colleges in SL

A new group has formed to support community college faculty, staff and students in Second Life. Are you a community college person? Search for the group "Community Colleges in Second Life" in-world and join us!

This group meets about once a month and will very soon have three in-world locations for our members to find each other and to use for meetings. Walk into the CCSL light! All are welcome!

Contact Pipsqueak Fiddlesticks in-world for more information!

Oh, and Happy New Year!