By Michael N. DeMers, New Mexico State University The author, shown as his avatar Gadget Loon, and his GIS class students hosted a GIS Day event in Second Life. A less expensive, transportable, and interactive event in the metaverse By Michael N. DeMers, New Mexico State University At New Mexico State University (NMSU), the 2009 GIS Day celebration took on quite a different look from previous years. Attendees donned avatar shapes and digital costumes to view student posters and projects inside a virtual display area in a portion of a multiuser virtual environment called Second Life. Aggie Island, as this virtual environment is known, is owned and maintained by the university’s College of Extended Learning and Information and Communications Technologies. As part of the author’s Geography 481 class, which teaches the fundamentals of GIS, 15 students voluntarily created virtual posters that demonstrated their GIS accomplishments. These students received official Esri Certifi68 ArcUser Spring 2010 Goes Virtual cates of Participation that are displayed on the backs of their posters. The display opened on GIS Day (November 18, 2009) and has been kept up to encourage GIS education and the use of virtual worlds, such as Second Life, for learning, exposition, and collaboration. The event, staged in the center of Aggie Island, resembled a scaleddown, virtual version of a poster session at the Esri International User Conference. As with real-world poster sessions, there was food (all digital and calorie free), beverages (including virtual champagne), free goodies (such as virtual GIS Day ball caps and T-shirts), and lots of information about GIS and how it is used. A small movie theater showed a YouTube video that introduced GIS to visitors who were www.esri.com