Second Life – social dimension
One of the aspects of virtual world SecondLife is the social interaction it enables between people from different real locations. I was curious as to how live music performances worked, and, having joined several live music social groups I quickly found a live performance in progress and teleported to a club lounge, where I found about 15 avatars dancing or standing around, and one with a guitar on stage animated to play the guitar, while the sound was streamed live into the sim.
The lone singer-guitarist seemed bemused that the host had vanished offline (perhaps their computer had crashed) and one of the audience indicated that they had a club and everyone could transfer there.
The new club “Sound Factory” was well set up with a dance floor, and several avatars were already dancing before the music had begun to stream.
Conversations were broadcast across the screen and when the sound came through the performer, Mr Jonze, spoke in response to several of the comments being broadcast. He interacted with the small crowd and conversed between songs, as though there was a small gathering in his lounge-room.
I asked the crowd if there were any tutorials on sound streaming, and got a rather abrupt response from the club owner, Politically Beck to say “it’s so easy even a caveman could do it”. Perhaps its not etiquette to ask tech questions of a probably knowledgeable crowd in a social setting, but I found that a bit unhelpful.
Nonetheless the music was good and the sound quality was surprisingly good lending a good club/restaurant atmosphere to the scene. It differed substantially from any Real life (RL) situation in that you could dance, converse and interact with the performer to a far greater extent than you could in RL. I had a good dance and conversation with Marieke CLoetens and laughed at the antics of Peet the monkey 🙂
And with it being evening in Australia, the performer Mr Jonze had just been up for an hour in the US and others were there in the room from the UK and from NZ – quite a mix that you wouldn’t find anywhere else.
I learnt a lot about the social side of SL, and look forward to checking out a couple more of the music venues.
Cheers
Jerry
Comment by rad Zabibha
You should come down to one of the live performances at Blue Fusion Jazz club sometime.
Posted on July 23, 2007 at 6:54 am
Comment by shylove moonsoo
Yes, live performances at Blue Fusion Jazz Club usually are on tuedays (7pm Uk time) and friday evenings (usa pacific time). Drop on by and have a dance along with our host/hostess.
Posted on July 26, 2007 at 12:50 am