Last week I had the opportunity to talk about Second Life with some of Ed Felten's students at Princeton. A year ago, a friend at Microsoft Research had explained that their favorite school to recruit from was Princeton. I hadn't really believed this, since with Linden Lab's development team heavily seeded with Berkeley grads, I'm fairly biased. However, after meeting a string of incredibly intelligent professors and students, I came away very impressed.
However, nothing blew me away as much as Ge Wang's demo of ChucK, their very cool music scripting language. ChucK is a per channel language with an excellent time and concurrency model that allows you to do all sorts of great synthesis on the card. The magic is the management of time across all of the threads that takes away a lot of the headaches. I immediately thought about how cool it would be to have the ChucK VM built into the SL client which would allow LSL to generate ChucK script (like using PHP or Ruby to generate Javascript) in order to create real-time audio on client machines. Finally, you could create audio in as collaborative a way as you currently build.
Moreover, the really crazy thought was that if ChucK's performance was sufficient -- and they had some help to beat on the security issues -- was that a time-focused scripting language would work really well as a UI scripting language on the client. So, go download ChucK and start playing with it. Then get on the developer mailing list and help make it better!