António Costa, candidate for Mayor of the Lisbon Town Hall through the “Unir Lisboa” campaign, opened today (Saturday, July 7th) his Virtual Campaign Headquarters in Second Life, a project managed by Eggy Lippmann and developed by Beta Technologies.

The Virtual Campaign HQ provides the programme of the campaign through an interactive interface that gives notecards and links to the visitors. Images and videos of all candidates, as well as of several people endorsing the candidate for Mayor, are also present at the headquarters, as well as an RSS feed to the campaign blog. A small auditorium is further provided for meetings and presentations.

António Costa also showed his own avatar to the audience of a discussion meeting on creativity and technology (two of the leading points of his campaign programme) with the presence of the Minister for Science and Technology, Mariano Gago.

While today the candidate did not have enough time to spend some time in-world to talk to the many visitors who approached the virtual headquarters, more events are expected to be launched during the campaign’s last week, including some live concerts, which will be announced soon.

The headquarters were opened to visitors after the official announcement and are located on the mainland.

Official press release: http://www.unirlisboa.com/data/main.php?pag=000&id=NOT468f9e262e656

Coverage on the campaign support blog: http://costadocastelo.blogspot.com/2007/07/muito-frente.html

National coverage on the launch: Diário de Notícias, Expresso Online

This structure was designed by Lordfly Digeridoo and Moon Adamant. More images are available here.