OK, this is a piece of news I’ve been dying to break. Tomorrow at 12:30 PST in the New Globe Theatre on the Millions of Us sim, Mark Warner, the Democratic Governor of Virginia, will be announcing his entry into. . . . Second Life.

Speculation has been going on for the last month or so about who would be the first politician to open shop in Second Life. I honestly didn’t expect this to happen for a while, but it’s just a testament to the ability of Second Life to astonish me. Hamlet covers the event and Governor Warner’s background really well here.

What I’d like to share are a few cool and surreal details form today as we scrambled to get ready for the event. In politics, image is everything, right? Well, there we were, constructing the avatar for a man we’d never met face to face, tweaking pixels and complaining about SL’s avatar creation tools. We’d send a screenshot over and hear back fro the folks at Forward Together, Warner’s PAC, things like, “His head looks too small” and the like. And then we realized, we’re sitting here tweaking the avatar of the man who could be our next president. . . . .

Other fun details included rehearsing the grand entrance with Warner’s team and debating whether it would be more appropriate to walk into the Globe or fly. You can guess which way I voted. Anyhow, totally exhausted, but looking forward to tomorrow and the months ahead — join us at the New Globe and in the new Forward Together group in Second Life. The town hall has gone digital!

Hot off the presses, thanks to the machinimistic stylings of AngryBeth Shortbread. (FYI, the original play featured typed dialogue — we elected to add voice in post-production because we weren’t going to show the whole play and its just easier to follow this way)

Click here for video.

Top 10 Coolest things about the first live performance play in Second Life.

From my point of view, three hours after the event

10. The audience was quiet!
9. Scene/Costume changes were done with a large curtain that came down over the entire stage.
8. The set design has this retro-murder look to it.
7. There is a mention of gopher killing.
6. This play was put together in less than one month.
5. The previous Shakespeare props weren’t off the stage for final rehearsal until two days before.
4. When we opened up the sim, Millions of Us, it filled over capacity within minutes.
3. The crowd insisted on TWO encores!
2. You could watch the play from anywhere! Watch it from the actors point of view!
1. This may be the first live play, but from today’s performance, it won’t be the last.
-Chris

Too tired and inspired to write much more than that after nearly a month of anticipation, the play that was performed was . . . . .highly entertaining.  We had a full house and the very idea of sitting here in a virtual theatre in a virtual world with people from around the real world is just mind-blowing.  As for the cast and crew, they could very well have all been on different continents which is just stunning.

Three weeks ago we announced the Millions of Us Challenge to create and perform a play in Second Life. Tonight is the night and I’m proud (and relieved) to say that folks have risen to the challenge.

As I said originally, the reason we’re doing this is because of how symbolic it is of the entire metaverse movement on so many levels. First and foremost, Second Life is about allowing people to try on different identies. The power of the medium is that it gives us the ability to turn dreams into reality and to share those dreams with others. But almost equally important is that doing a play in Second Life just happens to be very challenging. So tonight will be a celebration of that shared struggle to do things not despite the challenge, but in some cases, because of it. And when you think about it, Second Life itself would not exist if people hadn’t embraced that very same sort of challenge and pushed the envelope.

The show will begin with our feature performance of “From the Shadows”, an original play written by Enjah Mysterio and directed by Osprey Thereian. Following this, we’ll have a more free-form sort of fun where we invite folks to come on stage and tell a joke. We’ll be giving a prize not only to the cast of the play but also to the “Best SL Joke”.

For sim access, please IM Green Fate.

See you at the theatre! (It’s in the New Globe Theatre in the Millions of Us sim)

Wow!

This weekend at the Second Life Community Convention, we announced that we were bringing Scion into Second Life. This makes Scion the first automaker to enter Second Life and we’re super excited about what we’re going to be doing with them.

Image below from Intellagirl’s Flickr set.

The first vehicle we chose to produce was the iconic Scion xB — a perfect choice for Second Life because of its squarish, low-riding shape (easier to build from “prims”) and the company’s obsession with custimizable and self expression. To carry out the task, we tapped Second Life legend Francis Chung, maker of the famous Dominus Shadow - a version of which recently sold for US$ 2000 at an auction to benefit the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life in Second Life.

For the launch, the Millions of Us team of Green Fate, Chris Lake, myself and Francis Chung decided to blur the line between real life and Second Life for dramatic effect. We all donned royal blue jumpsuits (our uniform in the virtual world). Next, we convinced the local Scion dealer to lend us a silver xB — no small feat considering the conversation began like this, “We’re going to be launching a virtual version of the Scion xB into the virtual world of Second Life”.

On Saturday, we showed up with the real car. In Second Life, Cyrus Huffhines had been given 20 advanced copies and told to await the signal — a horn blast from real life, before dropping the virtual Scion on people in Second Life. We gathered a crowd in the parking lot of the convention in Fort Mason, and as the cold wind whipped off the bay, I asked everyone to help me count down from ten. When we reached the count of one, the signal was given and Green Fate drove the real Scion through the parking lot. As he made a hard left and disappeared behind a building, he slammed on the horn and Cyrus began giving out xB’s. The Scion had crossed over and become virtual!

Above is a photo of the Real Life launch. Below is one of me standing next to the virtual version in the New Globe Theater on the Millions of Us sim in Second Life.

Finally, as a treat for everyone, here’s a great launch video made by Nylon Pinkney.

We’re planning a full launch for Scion in October, at which time there will be customizable versions of the cars and much more. In the meantime, if you’d like a first edition Scion xB, please IM Cyrus Huffhines in world.

When I first met Philip Rosedale , he told me the story of Linden Lab’s first year in business. Most of the effort that year (1999/2000) was spent building something fondly known as “The Rig”. It was a haptic device, designed to allow users to walk around a virtual environment and interract with it using not only their senses of sight and sound, but also their sense of touch. Eventually, Philip and the gang realized that while the Rig was lots of fun, it was commercially uninteresting because there was no place to go and use it. So they decided that the market opportunity was to build that place. And so Second Life was born.

Well here we are 6 years later. Broadband penetration has increased dramatically. Video games’ sales have surpassed the Hollywood’s domestic box office figures. And Second Life has 370,000 residents. The time is ripe for haptics, and a company has emerged that may well be able to produce a compelling two-way haptic controller for the consumer market for around $100. That company is Novint and the product is known as the Novint Falcon.

Now the hard part: describing something that works on such a visceral and kinesthetic level in words. Before I first demo’ed the Falcon, I spent a long time telling my friend all about why the peripherals business was a terrible one. He simply nodded patiently and said, “Just try it out”. He then sat me down at the machine and took me through a simple demo. For the first time in my life, I was able to feel objects in virtual space, to push them, stretch them, manipulate them, all in beautiful, natural, rich detail. The pixels suddenly came alive. After I peeled my jaw off the floor, I realized that this product was going to change the way we all live in a fundamental and beautiful way. In fact, it really is the Second Half of Second Life.

I had a similar epiphany when I first saw Second Life: despite the lack of aesthetic polish, it seemed clear that the openness of the platform and the leverage that openness provided made this a “game-changing” product. Novint is the same way: once you touch a virtual object and feel it’s physical contours, you’ll never quite think about virtual reality the same way again. Because an avatar suddenly goes from something quite exciting (a “representation” of somebody in virtual space) to something mindblowing (a palpable representation of somebody”). And the degree to which this shrinks distance between us even further, the way it enhances the experience, is truly amazing.

There are currently only 8 Novint Falcons in the world, but the company is planning to produce several thousand in the next few months and have them widely commercially available by mid 2007. I can’t wait.