The Second Life of a Sensor: Integrating Real-world Experience in Virtual Worlds using Mobile Phones

Virtual world simulators like Second Life represent the latest and most successful frontier of online services for entertainment and business. People have virtual lives in these worlds using personal avatars. Bridging real life and these virtual worlds together is challenging, but enables new application scenarios for these systems. Existing work focuses on the representation of objects inside virtual worlds. We believe that the overall experience will be improved if we can reproduce not only inanimate and passive objects like buildings and beer steins but also the subjects in these virtual environments. In order to have a seamless integration between the physical and virtual worlds, and to maximize the scale of adoption, the system should rely on devices that people already use every day. For this reason, we believe that mobile phones are a natural and ideal conduit.

In this paper, we argue that the sensors embedded in commercial mobile phones can be used to infer real-world activities, that in turn can be reproduced in virtual settings. We discuss the challenges related to the implementation of such a system both from algorithmic and systematic points of view. We present the design of a prototype integrating a platform for inferring activities using mobile phones and Second Life. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that sensors used on everyday mobile phones reflecting a person’s activ- ity in the physical world has been expressed in virtual worlds such as Second Life.