The Office of Program Development & Community Outreach is pilot testing Second Life. Second Life (SL) is a virtual world developed by Linden Lab that launched on June 23, 2003, and is accessible on the Internet. A free client program called the Viewer enables its users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars. To download the viewer please visit the Second Life download page at http://secondlife.com/support/downloads/

System Requirements

The systems requirements are found on the second life website (http://secondlife.com/support/system-requirements/) . Note that these requirements are not updated frequently so new hardware may not be listed on this page. The best way to find out if your computer supports second life is to install a viewer and test it before an event. If you have any performance issues please see the troubleshooting section of this page.

Supported HSC Systems

All of the current OIT recommended laptop and desktop systems support Second Life. The Desktop systems will perform significantly better than the laptop systems. To view the current available recommended systems please visit the OIT hardware page.

Supported HSC Labs

We are currently testing labs for Second Life compatibility and are pre-installing Second Life in some labs. We hope to have a list of Second Life capable labs in this section in the near future.

Help and Support

The Office of Information Technology provides limited end-user support for second life but we do provide the necessary on-line documentation and recommendations. A good source of general help is available on the second life wiki knowledge base (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Knowledge_Base).

Troubleshooting

Performance Issues.

If you experience performance issues there are a couple of quick settings you might want to try.

1. Lower the Quality and Speed bar to an acceptable level. To do this go under Me → Preferences → Graphics and drag the bar from its current level to a lower setting.
2. Lower the cache size under Me → Preferences → Setup. This will work great for users with very slow or fragmented hard drives. For users with solid state drives or "fast" drives you will find that increasing the cache size will improve performance.

For further help on improving performance please see the wiki page at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Category:Improving_Performance.