Reader Steve Rubel tipped us to the virtual presence of an eerily familiar retail environment inside the Second Life metaverse. In this virtual Apple Store, you can belly up to the Genius Bar, or browse the imaginary products on the not-really-there shelves -- and yes, Laurie, that's a Cube there on the bar. Unlike the physical Apple Stores, though, it is possible to skip the glass elevator and simply fly up to the balcony. This also appears to be a different setup than the "Apple Core" store noted in this Cult Of Mac story from last year.
Rubel bets that this little slice of heaven gets the Apple Legal C&D treatment inside of a few days. Until then, you can visit the store via this SLurl (teleports you to the game location), by searching for "Aapl$tore" inside the game engine, or just look around in this Flickr set of images.
Thanks Steve!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-14-2007 @ 12:50PM
Mike said...
I can't imagine a C&D is coming. Linden Labs hasn't been copying brands or building any stores in Second Life. Instead the brand owners (or their marketing teams) have taken it upon themselves to establish stores or a brand presence in Second Life. Brands already running their own brands within Second Life include Adidas, American Apparel, Scion, and Leo Burnett (an advertising company). Here's Linden Labs' own summary: http://secondlife.com/businesseducation/gettingstarted/brandmarketing.php
-Mike
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2-14-2007 @ 9:23PM
Michael Rose said...
Mike -- I believe this is user-contributed, not Apple-contributed.
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2-14-2007 @ 9:48PM
Alex Paris said...
we don't leave product laying around the floor like that... thats just careless.
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2-15-2007 @ 2:17AM
Patrick said...
What do we see.... other than a few computer shapes, I don't see anything here that looks like Apple IP. There's no giant Apple logo in these pics.
The term "store" was used in the story above but it's hard to be sure anything we see is even for sale. They might be mere props created by a fan of Apple hardware. I will check it out inworld tomorrow.
The real-life buildings and store floorplans aren't copyrighted. Copying that would be OK. By the way, this place looks almost nothing like the Apple store in my area so I don't see much of a resemblance at all.
So that takes us back to the computer shapes, i.e. props. Apple might have a concern there but similar objects have been sold before by various different vendors, as decoration elements for SL houses. Several other vendors have sold fake iPods to wear as avatar decoration.
Apple can DMCA if they want, of course. I'd be happy if they'd sue Linden about the poor quality of the SL Mac client. Twice the MB of the Windows client, twice the heat on Mac intel hardware, twice the crashes and freezes.
It makes the product look bad.
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2-16-2007 @ 9:23AM
kohichi Aoki said...
wow, It's my screenshot! :-)
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