Heh, I don’t know if that title makes sense, so let me unpack it a little… I will be going to the iSummit conference in Sapporo, Japan, where I’ve been invited to coordinate the Second Life version of the event. We will be streaming the keynotes of the speakers physically present in Sapporo. Jimmy Wales, creator of Wikipedia, and founder of Wikia, will be delivering his keynote in Second Life directly on Japan Sapporo island!
This all came together just a few days ago, and of course we are still in the middle of the preparations, but we are planning some cool stuff that should make it so that the Second Life experience of those who come to see the event in-world is more than just passive sitting around, watching a webcast. We announced some details on a press release sent out yesterday…
For example we will be announcing a contest for designing the 3D logo for iSummit among Second Life content creators. The more dynamic, interactive, innovative the logo is, the better, starting from its original 2D version, to make sure that it lives as it should in a proper form attuned to its new environment.
Sometimes with popular events it happens that the sim hosting it is full, so we are making sure that we have also additional sims participating available to stream what we are going to show, and do. Currently, on top of Japan Sapporo, we have Vulcano, Lipari, and Okapi Island lined up, for a total number of Second Life attendees that can exceed that of the ones who are physically present!
In interesting tweak that I haven’t seen before (but that might be just my ignorance, so tell me if that is so), will make sure that Jimmy Wales’ keynote is also watchable from the additional sims. We will make an SL2SL stream! I hope to be able and quickly put up a video to show what this is, and how it is set up. It is a cool trick, with a fairly astounding visual effect in-world.
I want to thank Topix, and 2lifecast of Stex Auer, and friends for their precious help in making sure that on one hand we have all the bandwith we need to serve 200-300 simultaneous streams, or more, and that on the other all the technical parts are duly debugged and working. The people at iCommons are working day and night to make sure that everything goes ahead as smoothly as possible, and I will try to make sure that the same happens in Second Life on Japan Sapporo island!
PS: You might have noticed that the links to the sims in this post are not slurls, but secondlife:// handles. So what is the difference? The first is a convenient way to point somebody to a webpage that tells them “Hey, if you had the Second Life client installed, this is where you could go clicking!”, with the rather preposterous assumption that if they didn’t actually have the client, they’d proceed to download and install it, create an account and an avatar, go through the excercises that need to be completed before entering the wider world, and lo and behold, remember where they were, in the stack of their memories, and click on the teleport button on the slurl window that prompted them to this cascade of actions in the first place. Yeah, right. So slurls are useless in my opinion. Worse than that, they are a nuisance for those who have the client already, and even more so because a very quick connection mechanism is available right there. Instead of using a slurl, people can link with the secondlife:// handle, which loads the client if it is not already, and teleports to the location, without delay, and silly useless interstitials. There you go!