Over the last few days more than 1,000 images were submitted to the Yahoo! Time Capsule from within the user-created 3D virtual world of Second Life. The Electric Sheep Company created a virtual environment based on Jemez, New Mexico — the site of a real-world Time Capsule event (read more here) — accessible to people, er, avatars from around the world.

For four hours on Thursday and Friday night, people were invited to build and arrange 3D scenes and submit pictures from the virtual world to the Time Capsule. The Yahoo! Time Capsule sim will remain open in Second Life until November 6th, 2006 (so grab a free account at secondlife.com if you don’t have one). You can view images from the online Time Capsule and video from Jemez on screens and in an evolving 3D image sphere. (Note: You can still submit text and photos in Second Life until November 6.)

In true user-created metaverse fashion, where almost anything goes, almost anything went. In addition to noting humanoid visitors, I saw a giant lumbering teddy bear that would have given the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man a run for his virtual currency, dancing smurfs and turkeys, giant robots, and a young musician named Mel Cheeky, who logged in from Wales and sat on top of the Time Capsule drop box, serenading everyone for several hours on Friday night while streaming her live tunes inworld.

I’m the futurist on the Electric Sheep team (this is Jerry, co-blogging this with Jonah), helping guide the way to the 3D Web we see coming together between web-connected virtual world, video game, and geo-spatial technologies. For everyone in Second Life, the Time Capsule focused our thinking on the future of the kind of space we were in. How funny I’m sure we’ll look in 2020. (And no laughing about how funny we may look to you now! This is serious business :)).

We also sent an avatar from our very beta side project, playfully named Destroy Television, to the event to aid in the documentation. In many ways, Destroy *is* a time capsule, an avatar lifelog streaming live images from Second Life to the Web at destroytv.com and automagically posting tagged pics of everything she sees to Flickr (quite possibly the best photo service in the world ;)). You can watch a slideshow of Destroy’s most recent pics, for the moment cued to the Time Capsule event, here.

We’re really excited to have contributed to the Time Capsule project and doubly excited that Yahoo! would be aware enough to include the exciting frontier of virtual worlds like Second Life in the Time Capsule. This is a crucial time to capture the state of people’s virtual lives. We believe that Second Life’s current one million accounts are a drop in the bucket compared to the usage of these technologies in the future. Things can only get bigger for the metaverse in the next 14 years.

So, see you in 2020! Or in Second Life any time you want to look us up.

Jerry Paffendorf/SNOOPYbrown Zamboni &
Jonah Gold/Hank Hoodoo (Second Life Time Capsule chaperones),
and The Electric Sheep Company team