I was at the press conference opening the Swedish Embassy in Second Life today. Called the Second House of Sweden, it is modelled on the Swedish Embassy in Washington.

When we arrived, a woman was sitting by the side of the stage playing guitar and singing. Behind the table with the press conference speakers there was huge screen with live video from the Swedish islands in Second Life. The woman’s avatar was standing on a stage there playing guitar, while video of the real woman sitting a couple of meters from me was on a video screen behind her in Second Life. Turns out she was Natalie Moody, a famous performer in Second Life, who just happens to be a Swede.

Olle Wästberg, head of the Swedish Institute, talked about the project and Stefan Geens, project manager, took us for a tour. Among the highpoints:

• There’s an exhibition of famous Swedish paintings from the National Art Museum (click on paintings toget info about the work, but not digital copies)
• A display of typical Swedish foods, click on them and not only do you get menus that you can print our in pdf form, you also get the food in your inventory to put in your Second Life house.
• Similarly all the furniture, based on designs including IKEA, is available to download to your inventory
• Brochures about Sweden are on display, click and you get a pdf
• The Swedish Institute invited Swedes to submit typical photos about Sweden. These have been uploaded to Flickr, and some 60 are on display in the Second House of Sweden. A click there takes you to the photo on Flickr
• There’s a wall of links to Swedish sites in Second Life, like the southern Sweden recreation from the newspaper “Sydsvenska Dagbladet”
• The podcast of Radio Sweden’s daily program in English is available for listening while you are inside the building
• There’s a temporary exhibit about diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazi death camps while he was stationed in Budapest during World War II. There’s a reconstruction of his office at the embassy, made with the help of the OSA Archivum in Budapest (and created on their suggestion) and you can play the sound of an actor reading Wallenberg’s last report, before he was arrested by the Red Army

This last was created in cooperation with an organization in Budapest, and a parallel press conference was held there, with an avatar from Budapest inside Second Life attending the festivities.

Carl Bildt (left) and Olle Wästberg

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt was on hand to inaugurate the virtual embassy. While an Internet pioneer, Bildt admitted it was his second visit to Second Life. His avatar looked surprisingly like him, only extremely skinny. Flying from the concert to the embassy he announced he had gotten caught in a tree, and after some trouble with his inventory he took out an enormous pair of scissors and cut the ceremonial blue and yellow ribbon in front of the embassy.

Technically the whole event was flawless, and Electric Sheep did a fantastic job creating the building.

The embassy is of course more of an information office than a diplomatic outpost, the intention to be the first embassy in Second Life was thwarted by the Maldives which opened up a small building last week (Bildt kindly said he thought they would have better beaches than the Swedish islands), and one sometimes wonders what the whole point of Second Life might be?

But Olle Wästberg has pointed out that the USD 60,000 pricetag is about what they would spend on a single factsheet in several languages, and the initial announcement about the embassy had massive press coverage worth millions of dollars. The Swedish Institute has even set up a webpage where Swedes can sign up for Second Life avatars. Once you get online, there are special Swedish Embassy tutorials and you end up at the Swedish site, which consists of islands designed to look like the Stockholm Archipelago.

The location in Second Life is: 70,213,29