In the course of publishing Making Virtual Worlds, a few images ended up on the cutting-room floor, for reasons such as resolution, space, and the like. I’ve decided to post them here, along with some brief notes about each.

• I begin the book by recalling a moment when I stood before a print out of a Second Life continent (the “atoll”) then in the works. The image I have of the Heterocetera Atol, as it is formally known, was not high enough contrast for the book as printed,  so here it is where it looks better. This is an image taken in-world, some time after the continent had been brought online (but not too long — there’s still a fair amount of open space visible).

• This is an external view of Linden Lab’s office during most of the period of my research with them. They moved into 1100 Sansome  Street in late spring 2005 from a location south of market on 2nd Street. They quickly outgrew the space, however, and moved around the corner to their present location, 945 Battery Street, within the next few years.

• I’ve always been fond of this image, taken from within Linden Lab’s Sansome Street office in late 2005. One gets a clear sense of the open office environment, the relatively dim interior lighting, and the clusters of work spaces. My favorite part of the image, however, is the array of air ducts and other industrial features hanging down into the work area from the top of the frame.
  I had an idea that this might make a fine cover, if we could have done something like extend the ductwork upwards further on the cover, until it resembled the objects made in Second Life. Then the Lindens would have really been working “under the hood,” as they say.

• 

  A parody of a GAP ad my Linden Lab in early 2005.

  This last image is hosted at my university site. It is a parody that Linden Lab produced in early 2005, and which I have found to be a perfect way to illustrate the challenge Linden Lab faced that time as it shifted its emphasis from serving content creators to serving consumers. In addition to the wonderful image (shot in a “photo shoot” in Second Life), the ad copy is subtly shifted in every detail from GAP’s original (which I, sadly, have not been able to track down).