This is possible through a service called Splashtop , which enables remote access of programs on your PC from your mobile device. And as reader Ares Shoreland discovered, it gives you a pretty decent version of Second Life that almost seems optimized for a touchscreen:

This is a full-featured version of Second Life running on an iPad with touchscreen interface enabled, and it's pretty damn cool if you ask me:

"The performance [of Splashtop] was very good, so i decided to launch SL," he tells me. "The graphics were maxed out, with decent framerate (about 26fps)... You move by simply touching the ground where you want to go, and turn yourself and the camera by sliding your finger across the screen." So he bought an all-access plan ($1.99 month), which is supposed to enable him to do this from anywhere in the world where there's a Wi-Fi connection. Even remotely at other locations far from his PC, he tells me, "The frames were still good." He even thinks Linden Lab is planning to use a technology like this for an official tablet version of SL: "Linden Lab could have prepared Second Life to a touch future, and maybe that's why Version 3 has those big clickable icons."

This is starting to sound like an advertisement for Splashpad, so let me caveat all this by saying I haven't tried it myself (I have no iPad, and hello, I'm still in China), so I'd recommend you give it a trial look before putting down any money. But if it works as well as Ares describes it, we're talking a pretty great workaround solution for getting SL on mobile.

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