About the Author
Shenlei Winkler (Shenlei Flasheart in SL) is a 30 year veteran of the fashion industry. Her work spans both couture and mass market design and development for the real life apparel industry. A successful designer, her lifetime sales of her real life apparel designs have now reached more than $70 million USD, with more than 25 million-dollar styles in her portfolio. Her couture work has appeared extensively on stage and movie screen. Winkler has also enjoyed success in Second Life, where she has designed fashion since 2005, with three popular brands including Prim & Proper (one of the top Second Life earners in 2006), Flash & Trash, and Debutante. Her educational background includes three design degrees, including two from the prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology. She has also been instrumental in developing large-scale creative installations in OpenSim-based worlds, most notably Shengri La Spirit, previously hosted by IBM, and Shengri La Gallery, both of which will be published Summer 2009 as publicly accessible regions hosted by Intel Corporation. Founder of the Fashion Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on helping designers achieve their dreams with dignity, integrity and respect, she is currently the CEO of the Fashion Research Institute which is focused on researching and developing virtualization technologies with particular emphasis for the apparel industry. She is an adjunct instructor at FIT and Buffalo State University. Her research areas include content licensing for virtual goods, virtualization of enterprise in immersive workspaces, OpenSim enterprise application development, and user immersion in virtual worlds. Winkler may often be found in the Fashion Research Institute Shengri La regions in Second Life, where her seminal orientation program for immersive spaces may be experienced.