Those of us in the virtual world field have been all abuzz in the past week over the release of the new 2.0 version of the Second Life viewer. There are lots of new features that probably have no interest to the outside world. But one major change is that now you can easily bring into the virtual world of Second Life web content, including Flash, Google docs and YouTube videos.
This opens the door to all sorts of interesting 2D web to 3D space interactions, such as a virtual movie gallery to watch YouTube channel, or a virtual classroom where students can collaboratively edit a paper in EtherPad. And most exciting is that you can bringing in live video simulcasts from services like ustream.tv and Livestream.com.
As an experiment, I decided to see how hard it would be to stream video from Second Life into Second Life, and what would result. You can see above, it makes an infinite regression loop. This immediately called to mind the famous "turtles all the way down" paradox from cosmology. I changed to a ninja turtle avatar (Michelangelo, I believe) and indeed you can see that there are turtles all the way down. Cowabunga.
[Created using Livestream, Quicktime, iMovie HD, and CamTwist.]
That is fabulous!