Digital Birmingham is set to open a ‘Birmingham Island’ in Second Life. The lunchtime launch event is on 23rd October 08 at Millenium Point.

The island was purchased in May 08, and on it there will apparently be an interactive map of the city-centre called ‘b-scape’, among other features. Birmingham’s island joins the Summer 08 ‘virtual Birmingham City University campus’ in Second Life.

I recently jokingly suggested the possibility of a giant kitten clambering over Birmingham’s towers. Oddly now, this seems to be exactly the kind of thing now being enabled in Second Life — via sucking a Google Earth map + 3D buildings into Second Life, thus…

I’m wondering if the launch of Birmingham Island will also co-incide with the public release of a slew of new 3D buildings into Google Earth, to the level seen in the picture above (I assume they loaded up a private Council-owned set of 3D buildings, for the demo pictures). Because Birmingham city-centre currently only has a mere seven 3D buildings in Google Earth, as you can see here…

… and even Google’s Sketchup database shows only about 15 city-centre models, once the U.S. and suburbs stuff has been taken out.

For those interested in how Second Life might be used professionally, there’s an ASLIB workshop in Birmingham, titled Using Second Life, on 26th November 08. It seems to be open to non-ASLIB members…

“A half-day practical workshop which aims to help library and information professionals understand the uses of Second Life and to develop their Second Life skills.”

Coventry’s Serious Games Institute also has the event “The use of games and virtual technologies for supporting education”, on 14th January 2009…

“This workshop will explore the paradigm shifts with respect to leading edge research and development projects in the field”