AT THE Hot Licks Dance Club it helps to be able to dance. If you don’t have the moves, people tend to ignore you; but if you do — and especially if you’ve made an effort with your outfit — it can be very friendly indeed.

Or so it claims. The Times, however, cannot confirm this. Visiting the club in tight, blue leggings and a white T-shirt stretched over rippling muscles, your correspondent paused at the edge of the dancefloor, soaking up the Blade Runner ambience and hoping to be noticed.

At least 20 couples were grinding away to the Commitments’ thumping rendition of Mustang Sally. “I” was alone, but so was a slender young woman dancing provocatively in a dark cloak near the stage. I strolled over and was about to say hello when she cut me off.

“Sorry, gotta go,” she said. And then she turned away and took off, literally, like Superwoman.

It was an apt introduction to the take-no-prisoners nightclub scene in Second Life, of which Hot Licks is a tiny part. This is a place where novices can feel as gauche as pimply adolescents — but everyone can “fly” and regular visitors believe they are pioneering the biggest technological innovation since the world wide web.

Second Life is not a real place. It is entirely digital, and so is everyone there. Known as avatars, they talk in speech bubbles and walk like Buzz Lightyear. They are virtual representatives of real people who choose their online gender, name and basic appearance when registering on Second Life’s internet home page. I called mine Bill.

The whole of Second Life exists online: gigabyte after gigabyte of software script, most of it written by residents, all of it loaded on to 3,000 internet servers humming quietly in warehouses a few miles south of San Francisco. Each server is a stackable box of silicon brainpower, and between 150 and 200 new ones are added every month as Second Life’s population climbs towards 400,000.

It is here that the next online revolution may have begun. Second Life, and other virtual worlds like it, are growing as fast as the internet itself was 13 years ago. So far their users are mainly young and computer-savvy, happy to write their own software or buy it from other users to enhance their virtual lives.

But if virtual world operators succeed in wooing the masses as the worldwide web has, our experience of cyberspace will be transformed.

In Second Life last night, among waterfalls and lights on an idyllic island off the coast of nowhere in particular, American Apparel, a Los Angeles-based clothing brand, staged the grand opening of its first virtual mega-store. There was real music, courtesy of the brand’s own radio station, but there were also virtual tacos, virtual goody bags and virtual beer. Free virtual T-shirts were handed out to virtual guests and there were even discount coupons for real people determined to buy real T-shirts for themselves.

“We’ve been talking about virtual reality for years,” said Raz Schionning, the man behind the megastore. “Finally we’ve reached the point where anyone with a decent computer and enough (internet) bandwidth can see what that reality might look like.”

Virtual worlds have existed since the mid-1990s, and at least ten million people pay monthly fees to play multiplayer online games in them; but such games offer little in the way of socialising that cannot be done faster and cheaper in internet chatrooms.

Second Life, as new users quickly learn, is not a game at all. Its founder, Philip Rosedale, is an avowed Utopian with a physics degree from the University of California and surfer-dude looks. He has said he is “building a new country”, and there is something to the boast.

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