Melanie Swan has set up a wiki to keep track of data visualization efforts in Second Life (1):

* Background: Virtual worlds are the natural evolution of the Internet into a 3d commerce, information and communication platform. Streaming data into virtual worlds for visual display and interaction is an obvious next step.
* Vision: Build a virtual worlds data visualization community for the purpose of collaborating, developing, sharing and using tools

Scientific tools include:
* Euclidean Visualization Environment (EVE) - graphs 3d polynomial, exponential and trigonometric equations. Status: Available for demo (Michel Gallant/Stormbringer Blackflag, Pleiades Consulting)
* CAIA - Cheminformatic Assisted Image Array visualization laboratory. Status: Available to view (Gus Rosania/Caia Alter)
* Hiro's Molecule Rezzer - Rezzes molecules from a notecard. Status: OpenSLedware. (Andrew Lang/Hiro Sheridan) ONREZ
* Histogram (20 period, real-time, on-demand stock market data), production SLurl, dev SLurl Status: Open-source download available (Melanie Swan/Xantha Oe and Eloise Pasteur)
* Orac - Takes smi, InChI, or inchikey as input, queries three web services and rezzes the returned minimized structure in SL. Status: Avaliable upon request. (Andrew Lang/Hiro Sheridan)
* StoryMachine - Generic visualization tool for dynamic interactions. Status: In development (Peter Miller/Graham Mills), SLurl
* Protein Rezzer Toolkit - In-world rezzing of 3D protein backbone structures based on specially parsed PDB files. Status: In development (Peter Miller/Graham Mills; based on scripts by Troy McLuhan).
* Spectral Viewer (Andrew Lang/Jean-Claude Bradley) Status: available upon request.

Virtual worlds like Second Life provide new ways of interacting with data. How best to use these capabilities is being investigated by a small group of people. Second Life has already been demonstrated to serve as an effective platform for virtual meetings (2) and it seems logical that the ability to interact with data in real time could facilitate communication during these meetings. In fact, researcher Gus Rosania already uses Second Life to view microscopy results with his students. (3)

Going forward expect more of this type of use of virtual worlds, especially in connection with education in chemistry. (4)