[Photo]
The owners of Double Happiness Jeans set up their store at Eyebeam on Thursday evening. Stephanie, standing by a display rack of designer jeans samples, was talking to potential customers. Jeff assisted customers to place orders at a computer station which connected to the virtual factory of Double Happiness Jeans in Second Life and streamed live event at Eyebeam. Eight "workers", coming from several countries around the world, were at presence. For getting paid 200 Lindens an hour (about 90 cents), the workers waited at the assembly line, sitting at their computer screens, to perform their avatars once they received a cue from the voice chat to produce the jeans. This was the acting part.
I browsed through the product catalog. The jeans costs around 40 dollars. Susan from Eyebeam ordered a pair of My Pants. A image of the jeans was generated by workers in virtual factory, through a portal and server sending instructions to open the pattern in Photoshop on the same computer and print on cotton fabric via a large-format printer. After simple assembly – cutting, glue gun and stitching, a real-world commodity was created.
This mix of real-world and virtual economy seems to reflect on the similar working conditions of many remote jobs. While online interface opens more opportunities for workers of all kinds and all experience levels, even educational institutions would often offer lower compensation to a professor teaching online course than course on campus.
However, Double Happiness Jeans offers their workers a plot of virtual land to build their own home and provides spaces for recreational activities in-world and social networking. I am not sure if the stated mission of Double Happiness Jeans to produces jeans for profit is part of the mixed reality.
But the frustration to be able to find a suitable place and afford monthly land cost for such project is pretty real.
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