Second Life gets a Bay State boost

Second Life will soon be getting a second wind, with the help of some Bay State-bred technology.

Linden Lab, the San Francisco firm that created the popular online community, has acquired Windward Mark Interactive LLC, a Waltham company founded in 2003 by five Harvard University students.

Windward Mark creates highly realistic three-dimensional environments for use in computer games and flight simulators.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

"These guys are really pretty fantastic," said Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer of Linden Lab. "They make things beautiful."

Second Life is an Internet-based community that lets people meet and interact inside a three-dimensional virtual world. Over 6 million people worldwide have signed up for Second Life, with 30,000 to 40,000 people using the service at any given time.

A basic Second Life membership is free, but paying subscribers can own virtual real estate inside the community, and can build homes, office buildings, or sports arenas. Users can also start businesses to manufacture virtual items for use by other users.

A growing list of major businesses, including IBM Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., and the National Basketball Association, have set up virtual offices in Second Life. There they can show off images of their new products or hold virtual staff meetings and news conferences with Second Life users anywhere in the world.

But the 3D graphics in Second Life are relatively crude by the standards of popular 3D computer games like World of Warcraft or The Lord of the Rings Online. Ondrejka believes that making the environment more visually realistic will attract and hold more users.

Windward Mark software simulates the ways that sunlight is scattered by the atmosphere under different climatic conditions, such as fog or haze. "The trick is to build a unified lighting model where whatever you put it on, whether it's a watermelon or an F-16, it looks good," said Windward Mark president Asi Lang.

Lang said that he and his colleagues are already at work adding their software to the Second Life environment. He said users should see a major improvement in visual quality within several weeks.

Joseph Laszlo, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research in New York, said that improving Second Life's graphics could make it more pleasant for casual visitors and more useful to businesses. "The more you can create the illusion that a person is in a real place and not just a cartoony place, the more value you unlock," Laszlo said.

The Windward Mark team will join Linden Lab's new software development center in Cambridge, which opened this month. Ondrejka said the company expects to employ 30 to 40 engineers at the Cambridge facility by year's end.

He said Linden Lab already recruits computer science graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but the company realized that some job candidates don't want to move to the West Coast. "By putting an office out here, I think there's a real opportunity to tap into the really great talent that's in the Boston area," Ondrejka said.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.