When developing cognitive agents capable of interacting with humans, it is often challenging to provide a suitable environment in which agent and user are really co-situated. This paper presents a straightforward approach to use Second Life as a persistent, "near natural", and socially rich environment for research on autonomous agents in complex surroundings, learning social skills, and how they are perceived by humans. We describe an integration of our conversational agent Max, and his underlying cognitive architecture, with the Second Life environment. As a result, Max is able to autonomously navigate and multimodally communicate with other avatars inside the Second Life world. Observations from a first trial and reactions of human residents to the virtual agent are presented.

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