Fancy tobogganing down a mountain range that represents a line graph of monthly reference queries? How about climbing from bar to bar that shows the cumulative number of loans per week?

It’s possible in Second Life.

That’s Emerald climbing up a floating pie chart in the Michigan Library Consortium building in Cybrary City. It shows the MLC membership by library type.

At the moment, it’s just cool to clamber all over, but I have an inkling that this is an effective way to understand statistics. I can imagine walking through interlinked data and seeing relationships between figures represented spatially (eg. staff hours on ref. desk vs. number of enquiries vs. day vs. hour). Maybe even picking up new relationships or experimenting with what happens to the system if you make one bit of the graph larger. Just speculating

I chatted with Evie Mikazuki from the MLC. She’d been making a screencast in Second Life last time we met. I had presumed it was to introduce staff to what goes on in Second Life. Oh no, much better – she’d used it to illustrate a “best case scenario” for strategic planning. I think this is the type of application that Fiona’s earlier post on machima hinted at.