Large scale virtual worlds such as massive multiplayer online games
or 3D worlds gained tremendous popularity over the past few years.
With the large and ever increasing amount of content available, virtual
world users face the information overload problem. To tackle
this issue, game-designers usually deploy recommendation services
with the aim of making the virtual world a more joyful environment
to be connected at. In this context, we present in this paper the results
of a project that aims at understanding the mobility patterns
of virtual world users in order to derive place recommenders for
helping them to explore content more efficiently. Our study focus
on the virtual world SecondLife, one of the largest and most
prominent in recent years. Since SecondLife is comparable to realworld
Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs), i.e., users can
both check-in and share visited virtual places, a natural approach is
to assume that place recommenders that are known to work well on
real-world LBSNs will also work well on SecondLife. We have put
this assumption to the test and found out that (i) while collaborative
filtering algorithms have compatible performances in both environments,
(ii) existing place recommenders based on geographic
metadata are not useful in SecondLife.