Simulation of sensor-based tracking in Second Life

This paper describes "Second Life" as a novel type of testbed and simulation environment for sensor-based applications. Second Life is a popular virtual online world that provides a free networked multi-user three-dimensional (3D) environment. The overall goal of our work is to support the development, testing, and deployment of sensor-based applications. In particular, pervasive systems like smart environments make heavy use of wireless sensor networks. However, the development of such systems requires much effort and the success of a system relies heavily on good planning and testing. Many different factors have to be taken into consideration and the environment has to be modeled carefully to foresee potential problems or to be able to perform changes before actual implementation. Until now, only custom-made solutions exist whereby technical limitations restrict adequate testing. By contrast, our approach introduces a flexible architecture for an extensible testbed for sensor-based applications. It employs Second Life to model an easily customizable three-dimensional environment with various interaction possibilities.