I’d like to have been able to say how good the session Real opportunities in a virtual Birmingham, supposedly broadly about Second Life(tm), and specifically about Birmingham’s presence which has been developed there, was. I would, really.

Unfortunately, not only was the internet connectivity – both wifi and 3G – in the conference room so poor that my live twittering plan was foiled, but in fact the wifi was so poor that the session presenters themselves were completely unable to demonstrate Second Life; rather they presented a lot of crashing screens, a lot of wifi connexion dialogue boxes, and when we were connected, a lot of shots of the reception area in the virtual Birmingham.

The presenter was continually making apologies for this, explaining that it worked perfectly earlier and was only now not working, and that it must be a bandwidth problem with the internet connexion.

Which, as it happens, tends to be the experience most people I knowhave of using Second Life! Vaguely fine if you’ve got a dual core refridgerated Pentium X with a super accelerated 3D graphics card with half a gig of ram just on the graphics card itself, and Virgin cable’s 8meg internet connexion, but if you’re a normal person with a normal computer using a normal internet connexion, you’ve got no chance.

And that’s even before we get to the consideration of what the point of this thing is anyway.

The presenter was telling us how the user can wander around the Virtual Birmingham, call into the library, look at the Digital Handsworth exhibition, check what’s on tonight on the Birmingham free information zone etc, and how good that was. But the obvious question is, “why?”. Given that it’s much easier – and infinitely quicker – to go to all the ordinary websites for these things without having the faff of having to get the buggy, slow Second Life client software logged in and then walk to the locations, why bother?

One possible ray of hope was demonstrated, though. We were told how some of the people in the Technology Innovation Centre at Millennium Point had built themselves an accurate 3D model of the building within Second Life, enabling them to model such as risk assessments and get-ins for events before doing it for real. The possibilities were raised of planners modelling new developments such as the new New Street Station, or the new Library of Birmingham so citizens can get a much better feel for what they are going to be like, especially when it comes to public consultations on such projects. This can only be a good thing – assuming the planners actually do go through all the hassle of creating the models in the first place.

But as for ‘real opportunities’? The notion of people actually doing real business in a virtual birmingham, or having real social interactions? Sadly for the people who might be betting the farm on the gig, I suspect real online business and social interaction will be done using such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook for a long time to come.