Learning with the Fang

Ever wondered what happens behind the scenes of one of these newfangled ‘Mixed Reality’ events?  I had the good fortune to be involved with the 10th Birthday celebrations for EdNA both in Second Life and Real Life.  You would be surprised to know the amount of planning and effort that went in to it - big hat tip to KerryJ for taking some huge risks and dealing with some fairly major nasty surprises.

A week before the event we had a dress rehearsal in which it became apparent that a lot of work had already been done - arrangements with the owner of the island ‘venue’, booking of a live band and getting things built (including some fine T-shirts by Uncle Dave).  After tumbling gracefully down a hill in front of all these SL wizards I was embarrased to admit that I did not know how to ‘look up’ and see the screen mounted on top of the stage.

During the week before the event I spent some time in SL, tricking out my avatar and grabbing some props for the party.  Although I had returned to the same spot as the dress - rehearsal, things looked rather different.  The stage, cake and other party goodies were gone.  Turns out these things can be packed up and reset in seconds - do that in real life!

The morning of the event I logged in to SL to check my machine and re-aquaint myself.  There I discovered the hard working stage crew - setting things up before my very eyes - quite amazing to watch.  Here is a screen shot of slide show prep:

Setting up audio, computers cables etc was the usual real-life stress.  Lighting for the video crew was the first drama I witnessed - solved by a quick call to the maintenance crew.  Bung USB ports seemed to be the order of the day with troubles on my trusty mac and the main audio feed PC.  Being lulled into a false sense of security by setting up early, we were delighted to discover the main audio laptop was not getting power even tho everything was plugged in - we got that evil ‘reserve battery power’ message just before speeches went live.  Oh the fun.  This is the view from my seat on the day:

A little bit of McGyver ing and we were under way once more.  TomC gets the special McGyver award for whatever he did to get the camtasia recording machine working (last time I looked there were cables joining inputs to outputs on a vista pc that wouldn’t play ball with software audio control).  Dealing with audio lag from live speeches to SL was tricky - compounded by choppy audio breakup in my headphones due to performance issues somewhere between my brian and the SL servers.  If you think the delay after pressing next in powerpoint in real life is tense, try the experience inside SL.

The speeches went without a hitch (other than the usual presenter or two who refuse to stand anywhere near the microphone).  For the first time we got a chance to take a breather and concentrate on what was happening in SL - for example the fine work Dave did in greeting people and sorting out their various glitches and concerns.  Something that surprised me was the fact that more than 90% of my attention was captured by the in room dramas around me - quite different to my usual experience of being home alone and focussed ‘in world’.

Taking a look around the stage I recognised some of my buddies from ThePodcastNetwork were sitting together, so I went and joined them.  This felt quite bizarre - a type of virtual connection I had not experienced before - different to videoconferencing or other types on online meeting.  Grabbed a few screenshots, uploaded to flickr and tagged with ‘edna10‘.  By the time my photos had uploaded there were several others already uploaded, which made me think of an idea for next time - get people to take real life snapshots of where they are when taking the SL screenshots.  That would be cool.

After formalities concluded it was party time.  But not before one last nasty surprise - I heard the facilitator in world explain that the band showed up at the wrong time!!  Some quick hacks and a dance floor and canned music arrived.  (I wonder how many people even noticed this glitch?).  My SL dance skills seemed to perfectly match my RL ones until someone told me to touch the red ball near the dance floor.  Before I knew it some one had offered me a cow to ride and the fun started.

About this time I had another bizzare mixed reality experience - introducing Gerry White (real life) to himself (new avatar in SL).  Quite a strange thing to do!

Hats off to all concerned for a fascinating time.  Now its time to set up a Yahoo pipe and watch the edna10 tagged goodies roll in over the next week or so.  Stay tuned.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

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