Last month I had a new first — I attended a conference as an avatar. This was not a game, or a virtual-world get together, (or a trip to a virtual world nightlub — that’s another matter entirely). This was … real … although it feels odd to say so. Harvard’s Berkman Institute livecast their Beyond Broadcast conference into their Island on Second Life. Here’s their Welcome Packet for Virtual Attendees. And I found this flickr photo showing the outside of the building.
Here’s Dash Flintoff in the audience (that’s me). I’m the guy in black in the middle of the first row, with the vaguely purplish skin. (and it looks like someone came as a black-hole, I think that’s going a tad too far ;-))
It was very cool to attend this conference virtually. There were two sessions I wanted to hear, and I probably wouldn’t have gone in person. But, I set up my gaming machine next to my main workstation, put the conference on, and let it run all day. Berkman did a great job, the quickstream video feed into cyberworld worked flawlessly, and they had Ansible Berkman online monitoring the IM chatter and asking real-world questions for the meat-space panelists. I got everything I wanted from my two panels (one of which had the fun recursive effect of watching John Lester aka Pathfinder Linden from Second Life enter the virtual world for part of his presentation — we saw ourselves on the big screen and all got to wave at the rl attendees — I wonder how they felt, sharing their conference with us cyberfolk? I think it was strange for both of us).
Some quick googling shows that there is more of this going on:
- vloggercon2006 had some SL presence
- this guy did a virtual marketing panel
- Supernova has a showcase gala which was vidcast to SL
Live two-way voice conferencing is also here (pdf), thanks to the good folks from Vivox (who, by the way, are rigging me up with a demo version of their latest client, on which I will report presuming they are happy with me doing so)
I guess I’d better go buy some Second Life property before the real-estate values head up!
Technorati Tags: SecondLife, sl, beyondbroadcast, cyberspace, Dash Flintoff, Berkman, Vivox
[...] Jeff gave the world a first peek of Pulveria yesterday, and mentioned that a limited number of people will be able to attend his VON keynote from cyberspace in Second Life. I’ve had a lot of interest from people that picked up on my previous post about attending Berkman’s Beyond Broadcast session as an avatar, and wound up having some quite extensive discussions on this topic (leading me to buy a house in SL but that’s another story). [...]