(Above) A virtual Marina City? An elevator lobby in the west residential tower, partially morphed into a digital simulation for a new documentary about online worlds. (Click on image to view larger version.)

July 18, 2009 – Digital utopias – online worlds created as places for work and play – are the subject of a new documentary in which a Marina City resident appears.

Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, is considered one of the leading researchers of cyberspace and virtual communities. He was interviewed last September for “Another Perfect World,” a documentary by Dutch filmmakers Femke Wolting and Jorien van Nes.

According to the documentary, 70 million people spend time in a virtual reality on a daily basis. This online interaction, the film suggests, might even change how we perceive the real world.

Virtual communities “are the last of the public spaces,” says Ludlow (left), a west tower resident. “More and more, cities are eliminating public spaces – spaces where people can communicate and exchange ideas. We’re down to, like, shopping malls at this point. These are the last of the public spaces and they have to be protected at all costs.”

Ludlow first wrote about virtual communities in 1995. He says these days, almost all reality is virtual. “Money is virtual for the most part, as is intellectual property. Everything Bill Gates sells is virtual. There are deep [philosophical] questions about what money, computer programs, and virtual property are.”

Laws governing a virtual community are of particular interest to Ludlow. “If you can start from scratch and create new governance structures and institutions, how should you go about it? Should you have voting mechansims? What kinds of voting mechanisms? What can [and] should be voted on?”

He’s surprised that no one has built a replica of Marina City inside Second Life, a virtual world with 15 million registered users, each represented online by an avatar. It would not be difficult, he says. “Of course, it would just be a replica. The interesting project would be to build a multi-functional space inside Second Life or some other virtual world serving multiple functions like [Marina City] does. It’s a bit hard to makes sense of this, because restaurants and parking are not very useful to avatars. Virtual boats are sort of fun, however.”

 30-minute preview – Marina City shows up at 2:36 and 23:50.