Second Life for 3G phones

Never miss another Second Life dance party!
Credit: MoPocket

Can't wait to get home from school or work and jump on Second Life?

Rumours have swirled around before about the popular virtual microcosm making its way from PCs to video game consoles, but now a US based company plans to bring Second Life to your mobile phone.

The official word from mobile game publisher Vollee says Second Life "residents" will be able to "explore, interact and communicate online", and that this includes complete interaction with all Second Life players, not just those playing on a mobile phone. It seems unlikely that players will be able to do more than "travelling" and chatting to friends, but for a mobile phone port this is pretty exciting and should more than satisfy "residents" who need a chat when they're not in front of a PC.

The real catch will be how Vollee plans to "map" the game's interface to tiny mobile screens and the range of Second Life's controls to the limited handset keypads. Vollee offers some vague details about the game streaming to mobiles via its "powerful servers", which helps to explain how we might see pared down versions of the 3D environments on our phones, considering that the port doesn't appear to be handset specific and will probably need to run as a Java application, or similar.

The best part is that anyone with a 3G phone can participate in the beta. That means you! Vollee are taking pre-registrations now and plan to launch the beta testing in May.

Stay tuned for World of Warcraft on a mobile, and more failed marriages as a consequence.