Experiencing a Second Life Town Hall event
Attending live events in Second Life is always a pleasure. If you like pain, that is. With a few exceptions, the handful of large-scale live events I attended have suffered from various problems. Over a year ago, this was a common problem, and since then, various strategies and hacks have been developed to make live events work better.
The most interesting one is the combination of audio streaming with in-world discussions. I've seen this work really well with guest speakers and also live music performers. This is definitely a winner.
Today, however, was an official Linden Town Hall event, so it was guaranteed to be large scale. It's a text only chat with Cory Linden, head of the technical team. (Here is his introductory transcript.) Because Second Life regions tend to be limite to around 50 avatars, they set up a repeater system that was designed to transmit the text that was being typed in the main region to a network of repeaters spread throughout the grid.
After managing to find a nice place to listen at Colonia Nova, it turned out that the repeaters weren't working. The hostess, Gwyneth Llewelyn, was having trouble with her inventory, and logged out and came back in a few minutes later, hoping whatever it was she did would resolve the problem. It didn't.
Luckily, some smart folks had set up a repeating system on an IRC channel. Yes, IRC. IRC has been around for almost 20 years now. Gwyneth proceeded to manually copy-and-paste the text from her IRC client into Second Life. Good thing, too, because otherwise my 3D virtual world experience of attending a group discussion would not have worked at all.
I thought it was ironic that a 2006 virtual world technology was failing in the most basic things, a text chat with a few hundred listeners. And that a 1980s technology, IRC, would come to the rescue.
Sue Stonebender commented to me that one of the true wonders of Second Life is how quickly people adapt to current conditions and do whatever it takes to make life go on. She's right.
Quite an experience. Not what I expected, but very little in Second Life turns out how I expect it.
Quite an experience. Not what I expected, but very little in Second Life turns out how I expect it.
