Alcatel-Lucent is hosting an open contest for residents of Second Life, the popular social networking and virtual reality site (developed by Linden Labs, Inc.), to envision and design the wireless devices and applications they think will be possible in 2017, when access to extremely high capacity is widely available on always-on networks.
Participants are encouraged to unleash their creativity and join Alcatel-Lucent on an exploration of the future of user- friendly devices and multi-media applications that deliver content and communications to people whenever, wherever and however they want to receive them.
The contest helps launch Alcatel-Lucent's Fourth Generation (4G) Virtual Lab on Second Life at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment trade show and exhibition, taking place in San Francisco, California, October 23-25. For the contest, Alcatel-Lucent is providing residents with a "sandbox" area where they can use Second Life capabilities to build their ideas. This sandbox area is equipped with application development tools and simple user interfaces to help contestants bring their ideas for 4G services to life. While the specific qualities of 4G networks have not yet been established by any standards body (to be defined as part of the official ITU-R process for "IMT Advanced"), 4G is expected to offer extremely fast broadband capacity with peak speeds reaching 1 Gigabit per second, continuous connectivity, extraordinary reliability and quality with significantly less "delay" to support real-time services.
