The Intel islands are, for the most part, very slick. It’s easy to see why. Take a look at the land owners and it doesn’t take long to figure out that Millions of Us was contracted to do the work. As such, it’s a very, very polished marketing effort. What they have created is often much better than a 3-D brochure, but falls short of being someplace you’d want to visit again and again.
Beware of flying laptops. As you arrive on Intel island they fly up and greet you. At the entrance to the Intel tower is a freebie jetpack. But wait, there’s more! To make your jetpack functional you need to find a chip somewhere on the island. Good luck with that. Even with a hint I spent far too long not finding it.
A teleporter will take you down to a meeting areas, and further down to a main stage. No schedule of events was evident. That’s too bad, because they are both really nice spaces. Through the floor of main stage area you can see a CPU in a bed of lava. I guess that chip runs hot. You can teleport down to the chip for a closer look. Read a little blurb about the Core 2 Duo processor and… okay, you’ve seen the giant chip. Next. Where Sun pummels you with information that you could get on their web site anyway, the main Intel region is almost content free.
The next region over is dedicated to Intel Software. More meeting places, this time with a schedule of events. Except all the events occurred more than a month ago. Oops. Outside of that you can watch some videos about Intel Software. Exciting. Note to Intel: If you build it, they will come, but they won’t come back if you don’t give them a reason to.
The next region is dedicated to Orange County Choppers and Intel’s projects with them. On the TV show OCC and Intel constructed a high-tech motorcycle with an embedded Xeon processor. The region complements that marketing effort by letting you build your own version of the same in Second Life. The bike is actually very well done, though the process of building it isn’t as much fun as you would hope. You construct it using a HUD, but you don’t have any customization options. Once you’ve created the bike you can rez it at any time using the HUD and drive it through some streets and paths conveniently located outside the garage (or anywhere else, for that matter).
To some extent IBM is following the same playbook IBM did with Slam, their region for the Australian Open. But where Slam is located far away from IBM, the OCC region is contiguous with the Intel islands, making a much stronger brand association.
Again, once you’ve got your chopper there’s no reason to go back, but I don’t think that is the point of this particular region. In the process of building the bike Intel has hopefully filled your head with all kinds of information about their embedded processors. Intel also gets bonus points for not giving out any crappy t-shirts. All things considered, it’s a nice tie-in with the TV show. Now if they’d scheduled events with OCC crew… wouldn’t that have been taking it to the next level? So close, and yet so far.
So, Intel has a nice 3-D brochure with a few activities that will keep you interested for a while (or possibly frustrated for a while in the case of the chip hunt). As beautifully built as the regions are, there isn’t much to recommend repeat visits.
