Second Life Necessary Stopover for B2B Event Managers

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Permalink Reply by Phillip M. Perry on April 8, 2009 at 2:15pm

Interesting post about the Visa event on your blog. I continue to believe that Second Life or something like it represents the next development of the web, extending it into three dimensions and enhancing user interactivity. How soon will that happen though? Second Life has not taken off as quickly as I had thought. Could be that the winning technology will need to be more tightly integrated into the Web browser, maybe with a default avatar built in, so people don't have to get up and running on their own.

Some organizations are quite active, such as the Alliance Library System, a consortium of libraries around the world looking to extend educational efforts in cyberspace. They continue to expand and offer events concerend with library science.

I have attended several events in SL. They have been intriguing and the advantages of immediate access for participants worldwide is obvious. But the technology still has so many kinks to iron out. The event directors had a dickens of a time getting the sound to work right, avatar count accomplished correctly on adjacent sims, etc. A great invention, SL, just hard to tell what direction, and at what acceleration, the technology will go. By the way, interesting book just came out from AMACOM: "Unoffocial Guide to Building Your Business in the Second Life Virtual World."

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Permalink Reply by John Jainschigg on April 16, 2009 at 2:21pm

Actually, it's not the fault of the SL technology in most cases -- but rather simply a matter of expertise. Audio (with the exception of SL voice, which is native), video, web, etc., are all extrinsic to the SL platform except at the point of client delivery (where they become dependent substantially on Apple QuickTime). Metrics requires production and deployment of inworld scripted sensors, normally coupled to serious applications on a webserver.

These are complex technologies in their own right -- the AV stuff requires streaming engines instantiated on remote servers, powerful PC clients for uplinking, and considerable technical acumen and experience to manage well -- on the same order of difficulty as, for example, managing AV at a real-world event. (Having spoken at hundreds of events, I can say with assurance that I have never gone to an event venue with my laptop and "just plugged in" without the help of union labor.)

An investment of both time and money is required to evolve a proper rig, learn to run it, learn to deploy and redeploy it in different venues without breaking it, systematize a labor pool around it that accomodates varying scales and client timetables. And in virtual environments, this expertise is still thinly sourced, as is the ecology of vendor companies (e.g., video-streaming hosts) with offerings that match virtual world event requirements.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of companies capable of routinely deploying reliable A/V, audience registration, access control and metrics around an event in Second Life -- top of the line for turnkey virtual worlds/web event content, tech and production are probably my friends at World2Worlds (www.world2worlds.com), who work for Cisco, Sun, etc. For AV only, the folks at SLCN.tv (www.slcn.tv / www.treet.tv) are also great.

When you see events professionally produced in the medium, it makes a huge difference -- just as you see high-quality results when corporates seek out first-rate web talent to build a mission-critical website. The thing to remember, though, is that building a first-rate website is just one way to skin the cat ... as corporates are realizing, you can also use blogging, Facebook, Wikis, Twitter and more home-made and shared media to good result in many contexts -- and this is empowering and saves money and time.

Second Life also supports this latter paradigm, i.e., a bunch of librarians can actually get together and -- if they're smart and willing to work hard -- can do a credible, content-rich, socially-beneficial, informative, and fun event in globally-accessible, immersive 3D virtual reality at very small investment, so long as they stick within the native capabilities of the platform. And this is pretty great.

Publishers and corporates can do this, too -- a model World2Worlds CEO Kim Smith calls 'Event Blogging' -- where an upfront consult gets you a whole articulated venue: comprising an event website, a fully-branded SL-account-creation/registration, avatar prep and inworld orientation experience, a fully-custom inworld auditorium and access to media tools and software for self-production, access control, Omniture-like metrics, plus training, plus membership in an inworld network calibrated to drive qualified supplementary traffic where you need it to go.

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Permalink Reply by Phillip M. Perry on April 28, 2009 at 12:50pm

Thanks very much for posting these clarifications about the technologies. It will be interesting to see what lies ahead for SL and other virtual worlds.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Zingalis on April 21, 2009 at 10:39am

I saw a 300 pound woman at my local drugmart that opened up about her everquest account, and she happily laid out the facts on 2 level 72 clerics, and how she was the mom of the group. That was a great conversation, but I couldn't help but notice that 50% of the teeth in her mouth were gone....they seemed like important teeth that you might need for grinding and distributing solid food. She was really living it up.

I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. SL just brings up visions of the fat people in Wall-E floating around like fat spineless jellyfish on hovering wheelchairs, almost incapable of standing up. I guess the internet is a clear vision of a multi-dimensional physical atrophy inducing brain fart, so on with the matrix! Make sure you have extreme doritos there. I'm sure you could sell something there though, as the old adage goes, "a sucker is born every minute". Speaking of which, i'm going to sign up right now.

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Permalink Reply by Glenn Laudenslager on April 28, 2009 at 1:35pm

Great points all, and this discussion definitely made me stop and think about the virtual world and getting up-to-speed on it. I think many of us get so caught up with leveraging the current Web 2.0 hot buttons (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) or just selling the basic benefits of Web 2.0 and social media within our own companies, that we forget about being ahead of the curve the next time.

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Permalink Reply by Kim Smith (Rissa Maidstone) on June 25, 2009 at 4:58pm

Great discussion--just reading it for the first time. In response to Michael Zingalis and Glenn Laudenslager, as well as other readers, I'd like to invite you to two events June 30 and July 1 in Second Life for Cisco Live. Aimed at business strategists and IT solution implementors, these unique online sessions offer attendees the opportunity to dialogue live with some of technology's most insightful and creative personalities on two topics that will profoundly impact the internet's evolution over the next decade: virtual worlds and sensor networks. If you're interested in attending (it's free), you can get more information at http://www.world2worlds.com - or email me at ksmith@world2worlds.com

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