The economy may still suck in real life (even if we’ve managed to avoid a Great Depression redux) but in Second Life, it may as well be 2006. New Scientist reports that Americans will spend $621 million (in real dollars) in virtual worlds this year, while the Asian market is dropping an estimated $5 billion (which also fuels the Internet addiction rehab market). Second Life in particular is raking it in with $144 million in transactions in the second quarter of 2009—a 94 percent increase from last year.

What virtual goods are all these real people buying? Well, just about everything, from clothes to art to buildings to sports equipment to…sex gear. Lots of sex gear. And some users are making serious money. As NS puts it:

With its users swapping virtual goods and services worth around $600 million per year, Second Life has the largest economy of any virtual world – which exceeds the GDP of 19 countries, including Samoa.

Give it a couple more years and it might even be too big to fail.

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Image: Courtesy of Linden Labs

There’s plenty of real-life drama to go around in the land of virtual worlds. And given what a major part sex plays in Second Life, it’s not altogether shocking that one activity gaining traction is the chance to give virtual birth [link not in any way safe for work].

Avatars are able to get pregnant the (virtual) old-fashioned way, and can choose the location in which they deliver. The whole process is mighty up close and personal, and results in a somewhat surreal-looking newborn avatar. The details often depart substantially from reality—babies are typically born in a matter of minutes, and sometimes emerge from the womb wearing cute onesies or resembling teddy bears—but the general experience is nonetheless captured. The births have even made waves in the (real) midwife community, with a midwives’ group setting up meetings and performing deliveries within the virtual world as an opportunity for professional education.

Here’s a pretty typical example [Warning: Not really suitable for children, or most adults, for that matter]:

Soon, every single American will have a digital avatar—and we’re not talking about Second Life characters. Researchers at Virginia Tech are building a nationwide computer simulation that will include 300 million synthetic individuals with true-to-life characteristics taken from U.S. Census data. The researchers say there are many uses for the simulation, from predicting the spread of infectious diseases to tracking fads and modeling traffic flow.

The program, known as EpiSimdemics, already has 100 million simulated residents. Each resident is endowed with as many as 163 variables, including age, education, occupation, family size, and general health. Although each synthetic resident isn’t meant to represent a specific real-life person, the information is taken from publicly available demographics data. The residents are mapped to real houses and real neighborhoods and assigned local schools, grocery stores, and shopping centers. The researchers hope to add more variables, including air travel using real-life flight data.

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As the paparazzi wait for celebrities to walk by with perfect hair, researchers have found a way to create perfect hair graphically. Scientists at the University of California at San Diego used cameras and light sources in a new way to create ultra-realistic hair on animated figures.

The researchers took 2,500 images with 16 cameras, used 150 light sources, and set up three projectors to determine the exact position of each strand of hair and imputed the data into a complex model. Most animated films shown in theaters today typically only show characters with treatment done to the top layer of their hair. The secret to this new model is that it looks at hairstyles from all angles to focus in on individual stands and reproduce the strands from the scalp.

The model shows how light reflects off of 100,000 hair strands —an important feature, especially when animators need their characters to look normal when the wind blows and when the sun shines. “We want to give movie and video game makers the tools necessary to animate actors and have their hair look and behave as it would in the real world,” says U.C. San Diego computer scientist Matthias Zwicker.

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