For over five years I’ve had the extreme pleasure of knowing an evocative, intelligent individual in both RL & SL. The first time I met him in Second Life, he could have filed an abuse report on me. The talented writer of the New World Notes blog (with a bevy of other writing credits under his belt) has written his first book, “The Making of Second Life“.

Please join us for a “mixed reality” party in celebration of Hamlet Au’s (Wagner James Au in meatspace) latest achievement!

Past
Thursday, April 24
5:00-8:00 pm SLT

It’s going to be a “mixed reality event”, meaning that he’s also having a parallel party in a penthouse in New York City! While he’s chatting with us in world, he’ll also be hanging out with friends and wine IRL and posting pictures of the party there on a laptop at the penthouse.

Contact me (Lyra Millionsofus) with any questions! See you tomorrow.

I can’t stop watching this VIDEO of the event we did to help Scion launch their new line of 2008 cars. I’ve watched it 10 times now and it’s still hard to tell what’s happening in Chicago and whats happening in Scion City Second Life. The Scion guys are amazing clients to have because of the risks they take and how far they push the envelope. Enjoy.

So I’m sitting here in Aspen getting ready to fly back to San Francisco and just thinking about the event. Overall, I was blown away by how well it all worked and people really seemed to enjoy themselves. Going into it, we were pretty nervous because (as Mark Wallace said to me), “comedy is such a high bandwidth experience. With the impending release of realtime voice capabilities in Second Life (and the inevitable debate about that), I thought I’d jot some thoughts about doing comedy in SL.

The general format of the event was as follows:

1.  People arrived and we had drinks and hung out for about 15 minutes.

2.  Hyla Matthews, the standup comedian, welcomed the crowd, did about 5 minutes of schtick and then introduced some videos of comedians from the Festival in Aspen

3.  Hyla did more schtick, this time walking into the audience for some live interraction.  Intro to more videos, this time selections from the film festival component ofthe Aspen Event.

4.  More schtick, this time focusing on Second Life jokes, which seemed to work really well.  Intro final videos from This Just In.

The toughest thing, by far, was the 17 second delay from when Hyla said something on the Skype call and when it was heard in Second Life.¬† Hyla really struggled with this — trying t get straight who was haring what and when.¬† In so many ways, comedy is about split second reactions and when the audience said something in chat, a 17.5 second reaction just doesn’t quite feel split second.¬† Behind the scenes, we did a lot of work to make this easier for Hyla and less apparent to the audience.

The other thing we noticed was that without the immediate feedback from the audience, Hyla couldn’t tell whether people were laughing or she was getting “crickets”.¬† One great idea that came up was in the future to have Laugh-Meters that the audience¬† could click to register overall amusement.

In general this was an amazingly enjoyable and eye-opening experience.  It also makes me realize just how game-changing the addition of real-time voice will be for day-to-day interraction, collaboration and work, and for entertainment.

Tomorrow morning starting at 9 am SLT we’ll be doing this event with Cisco and the Santa Fe Institute. Mixed reality with all the fixings!

As you can see, we’re running some streaming tests in preparation. The event will be streamed live to 4 locations on Cisco’s islands. Here are a couple of them.

Should be a lot of fun!