Second Life™ is a virtual world platform created by Linden Labs. You may read the official documentation at The Second Life Introduction https://secondlife.com.
From a resident perspective, Second Life can meet many needs. Residents can of course create multi-user games for themselves, however the platform is also well suited to social functions, education, marketing, and business.
Second Life is implemented as a client-server platform, using a client application that displays the rendering of the virtual world, and a server application, running on a massive set of servers, that provides the interactive manipulation of the virtual world. The virtual world is divided up into regions, with four regions being handled by each server. The 3D virtual world is scaled so that each region represents a 256 x 256 meter area. A large number of servers support a grouping of regions into contiguous virtual world continents. These continents are open to all residents for exploration and play. There are also islands, where a person has paid for a private server, and thereby has a set of regions that solely under their control and can be customized anyway they wish, and the access to other residents can be controlled. Such regions are referred to as islands.
Here is a lexicon.
- Region: a fixed portion of the virtual world.
- Resident: a person who has registered with Linden Labs to access the virtual world.
- Viewer: the client software application used to render and manipulate the virtual world
- Avatar: the bodily appearenace of a resident when visiting the virtual world.
- Free tier: a no cost account for a resident. Such an account can not be used to build objects in-world.
- Paid tier: an account with a monthly fee, able to build objects and hold a certain area of a region.
- Premium tier: a higher paid account, with additional land holding opportunites and support.
- Estate owner: an account that has purchased a private, fully customizable region.