A couple of years ago, a few of us were throwing around the idea of building the Large Hadron Collider in Second Life (SL), the virtual world that has been pretty popular in recent years. I was hoping that we could build a virtual collaboration of people to construct the whole LHC in SL (and try to beat the real thing to construction).
Once it was running, the idea would be to feed real data from the LHC to the SL version, and have a really detailed 3D virtual tour of the facility, which people won't be able to get into once beams are running. Unfortunately, like so many plans, I didn't have time and resources to really pursue it.
However, I see that a dedicated LHC fan has created the ATLAS experiment from the LHC in SL. Unfortunately, he couldn't keep it built in place as he did it on somebody else's land for a while and it's a pretty intensive simulation, with 1300-1500 individual 3D elements. Perhaps one of our readers out there has some SL land they would we willing to provide to the entity known as Professor Panda (SL name Ryushimitsu Xingjian).
Of course, not everything is scientifically accurate--this is done in the spirit of fan art--but I can tell you from having been in the ATLAS cavern while it was being built, that this does a very good job of the look and feel of the real detector.
Xingjian has made a video of his construction while it was still standing. Let's hope that it can find a permanent home and that LHC construction in SL might continue. Get in touch with me if this is a project you are interested in.
Also Wagner James Au at New World Notes, a Second Life news publication, has a lot more info on this project here.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkvPHcWD1IQ
