When you’re 27, in Italy, if you're still doing a bachelor, all you can do is make a vow to the Virgin Mary. Vladlen Koltun, instead, got a PhD when he was 21 and has been teaching Computer Science for 3 years now. At Stanford, Silicon Valley’s backstage, where all the future founders of Google and You Tube studied.

Now Vladlen – that we meet in his own study in the Californian athenaeum in a beautiful autumn day – is working on a project that is expected to be revolutionary: he’s trying to create what I would define the Second Life-killer, the alternative to Second Life, the virtual community praised by the media and around which a real business is gradually growing. “Second Life has a problem of scalability [see Vladlen's comment below]. Moreover there’s a security deficit: anyone can easily listen to conversations and enter spaces he is not authorised in. With our project, these problems will just become memories”. The name itself is meant to underline this idea of stability: in the Buddhist religion Meru means spine of the world, something that keeps everything together.

All the work, guided by professor Koltun (in the picture on the left as he appears on the Stanford web site) and sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, began in January 2007 and involves a multicultural team – the Virtual World Group – of 9 people altogether among whom Indians, Chinese and Americans.

And Vladlen? Where is he from? "I was born in what was then Soviet Union and is now Ukraine, in an country and a culture that are disappeared nowadays. It's for this reason that sometimes I say I feel more Soviet that Ukrainian...(he laughs). No, well, if I had to feel I’m something”, says Vladlen, Russian mother tongue and fluent in English and  Hebrew, “I would say I feel European. I feel more at home in the Old Continent than here in the States where there’s no tradition of beauty production” [see Vladlen's comment below].

Yet, maybe also to fill this gap, Vladlen is modelling this “alternative space” that, for him, is virtual reality. The first version of Meru is due to arrive at the end of 2008. “But be careful. The things that mostly resemble Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash are some computer games with which you can modify the world”. Meanwhile, real world is not interesting for Vladlen who says he hasn’t yet thought about starting a business: “At the beginning Internet itself wasn’t meant to be a business and it was started here in Stanford with the Arpanet project”. The rest of the story is renowned. Not bad for a Soviet.