Second Earth ?

The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth.

The map I am standing on belongs to NOAA, and it covers a 12-by-20-meter square of lawn on a large virtual island sustained entirely by servers and software at San Francisco-based Linden Lab, which launched Second Life in 2003. (On the map's scale, my avatar is about 500 kilometers tall, which makes Illinois about three paces across.) Corbin, who's on a personal mission to incorporate 3-D tools like this one into the science curriculum at Denver, paid ­Linden Lab for the island so that he could assemble exhibits demonstrating to the faculty how such tools might be used pedagogically. "Every student at DU is required to have a laptop," he says. "But how many of them are just messaging one another in class?" A few more science students might learn something if they could walk inside a weather map, he reasons.

Corbin's got plenty to show off: just west of the map is a virtual planetarium, a giant glass box housing a giant white sphere that in turn houses a giant orrery illustrating the ­geometry of solar eclipses. And he's not the only one to offer such attractions. Just to the south, on an adjoining island, is the International Spaceflight Museum [video] [SLurl], where visitors can fly alongside life-size rockets, from the huge Apollo-era Saturn V to a prototype of the Ares V, one of the launch vehicles NASA hopes to use to send Americans back to the moon.

Second Life, which started out four years ago as a 1-square-kilometer patch with 500

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