Second Life Uses

Although I have a general lack of interest in Second Life as a virtual world/community, I can see uses for it that would be beneficial to areas I have greater interest in, particularly video. The ability to create characters and objects, then photograph them from any possible angle and distance makes it a very usefull tool for storyboarding. Add in using screen capture software and you can create a pretty good feeling for how a scene is going to run through time wise. This also gives you a lot of freedom to experient with different shot framings and camera angles. You can also test build sets fairly quickly and easily, enabling you to get a better impression of what's going to work and what might need changing, without having to invest money and time into buying mateials and creating a set only to find its not going to work out quite how you'd imagined. I can also see it would be useful for creating an animatic for 3D animations. Having used flash to create an animatic for my maya animation I know it isn't the greatest way to do it. Whereas with second life I could've made a model of my character really easily, then taken different shots of it, which would reult in something much more similar looking to how the final animation is going to be.