City of Birmingham establishes virtual island in Second Life

Birmingham has taken on a whole new identity with the establishment of 'Birmingham Island' in Second Life, the 3D virtual world environment.

'Virtual Birmingham' will be launched by Birmingham City Council leader Mike Whitby at this week's Hello Digital festival at Millennium Point, Birmingham (23rd-26th October). Developed by Digital Birmingham, it demonstrates the potential of digital and virtual technologies in delivering public services and interacting with citizens, and aims to incorporate virtual worlds and web 2.0+ activity within Birmingham under one co-ordinated banner. In the long term, this will provide city planners amongst others, with a powerful tool for online consultation and marketing, as well as huge scope for inward investment. Although several other cities have a presence in Second Life, Birmingham Island's showpiece attraction, b-scape, is the first to integrate other online applications such as Google Maps, video and RSS feeds to provide a whole new layer of collaboration.b-scape is effectively a 3-D information area centred around an interactive screen, which focuses on a map of Birmingham's physical city centre. It allows visitors to experience the city via an avatar (a virtual self), which are then able to interact and collaborate with other avatars in Second Life and control b-scape. Through the avatar, the user can navigate around Birmingham using Google Maps technology and discover information about key buildings in the city centre, play videos and access RSS data. Importantly, b-scape can be experienced collectively by many individuals at the same time, making it an ideal virtual environment for meetings and training sessions. It could allow architects and developers to plan the development of the city and see schemes in relation to their surroundings, as well as enabling visitors to plan their trips in advance. Birmingham Island offers great potential for local organisations and companies wishing to have a presence in Second Life and to explore the opportunities presented by virtual world. The new Library of Birmingham, due to open in 2013, is already planning an interactive site on the Island, and Digital Birmingham believes the island will prove invaluable as a resource for other local organisations."For organisations to be able to see the city as it looks now and plan how it could look in the future is an extremely powerful tool," said Birmingham City Council's deputy leader Paul Tilsley, who heads up the Digital Birmingham partnership.

"The potential is enormous: visitors could browse the city's attractions and amenities to see for themselves what it's like before they visit, residents could access local services, event organisers could use it to showcase exhibitions and displays, and could even host events in the virtual world with performances accessible online."

London, Liverpool and Manchester have all used Second Life but it is believed that Birmingham is the first council in the UK to utilise a range of virtual world technologies to interact collaboratively with the public and local businesses. Birmingham Island goes live on October 23rd.

* - Article from Publictechnology.net