I wrote last week about Jeff Pulver’s pilot use of Second Life during this Fall’s VON conference. Jeff built this island over the summer, designing it be a place that could be used for everything from large scale presentations to smaller interactive meetings. This island itself is just beautiful, and the conference center sits on the sea and is built into the cliff and mountains in a breathtaking fashion.
Jeff broadcast a video stream of his keynote live into main auditorium and onto one of the smaller screens in the upstairs lobby. SL attendees had clear audio and video. Towards the end of Jeff’s talk, he switched his presentation over to a live view of the SL auditorium, so the real life audience could see what was going on. He then spoke over the Vivox enabled mic to a virtual attendee. When he concluded the brief demo the RL audience spontaneously burst into applause. It was very exciting and gratifying, given that I’ve been working with Jeff and Jonathan Askin on this project.
Numerous mentions of this were picked up in the blogosphere, with some serious and humerous anecdotes related. Probably the most thorough writeup is an article in In the Grid, a Second Life monthly magazine. It’s worth a read and has some great pics. Other links I found are:
- Webpronews (mentioned at bottom of article)
- Jon Arnolds comments (excepted by Jeff)
- Email from viewer (posted by Jeff)
- David Siegels account (including machinima clips)
- An article in “In the Grid”, a Second Life monthly magazine
I’ve said it before and remember you heard it here early (if not first) — the first V in VoIP was Voice over IP, now we have Video over IP, and the next one coming is Virtual-worlds over IP. We may be a ways from the Star Trek holodeck, but the technology available today is starting to be usable for real life purposes. Very cool.
(For those of you that are SL residents and would like to go explore, drop me a note and I can get you access to the land)
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