If you saw Blade Runner 2049 from a few years back, you probably remember the Ryan Gosling character visiting the eerie headquarters of the Wallace Corporation, which has replaced the original film's Tyrell Corporation as the leading developer of replicants, i.e. artificial humans.
And if you went shopping at the Second Life headquarters of Inthium, lead developer of mesh avatars (i.e. artificial humans), you might have noticed a distinct resemblance to Wallace Corp:
"We liked the movie and was good for the store theme," Tatsuya Inithium confirms to me. No word if this encouraged shoppers to consider the underlying "What does it mean to be human?" theme of the Blade Runner movies and the Philip K. Dick novel they're based on. But I do love the idea of creating shopping experiences which evoke acclaimed movie scenes.
Click here to teleport yourself there like attack ships off the shoulder of Orion. And hat tip to a longtime SL creator for the Blade Runner tip!
This feels perfectly right. The avatars, the replicants, the spiraling futurism, the darkness that advanced technology evokes, that display of laboratory experiments, the cages (like a Victorian freakshow zoo), the choice and variety of *bodies*...... it all fits. Blade Runner and SL are of the same family.
Posted by: John | Saturday, November 11, 2023 at 05:51 AM