The view of VON (from Pulveria)

As a followup to my last blog, I wanted to share my experience of Jeff's video-on-the-net keynote from within Second Life.

The presentation itself went quite smooth. The video stream started promptly at 6:00am, and the already full room of avatars took their seats.

My Avatar, Tek Guru

When it was time to put second life on the screen and to interact there was a pretty bad delay, which was a bit awkward, but eventually Jeff got through to us on audio, I'm pretty sure via Vivox. I didn't have the Vivox client installed, but even so I probably would have turned it off or I would have had a double audio feed, one from Vivox and one from the video stream.

Despite a bit of clunkyness, I'd say that overall it went very well. I really appreciated the chance to see the talk, and I wished that it could have gone on all day. I would have popped in and out of the pulveria center in between my meetings during the day to catch what I could.

The best part of the experience for me was after the keynote talk. Just like in a real conference, several people lingered in the back of the room and started chatting. Some of these people were employees of Electric Sheep, the company that helped Jeff Pulver put together the island as well as do the A/V and streaming aspect of the keynote broadcast into Second Life. Also present was a Second Life journalist/blogger by the name of Miller Copeland who was asking a few questions of the 'sheep' for an article she was writing, which you can see here. Her blog In The Grid is just getting off the ground, but it has some interesting content already, so you might want to pop over to it and have a look if you're interested in more of Second Life's flavor.

After Miller Left I continued chatting with Sibley, Electric Sheep's CEO, and I learned that the source code for Second Life had always intended to be released open source. At what point and fashion that may happen is anyone's guess, but it would make some of the ideas I spoke of in my last post possible, in particular the secure enterprise-hosted server. If you add to the mix companies like Electric Sheep who are willing to build the perfect 3D environment for corporate collaboration, will you have the recipe for the next generation of collaboration?

I fraps'd two sections of the second life experience. The first was near the beginning of the keynote where I just looked around in first-person mode in my avatar to see who was there.

Click Here to Watch (or right-click and save to watch later)

The second part I grabbed as soon as Jeff mentioned Second Life.

Click Here to Watch (or right-click and save to watch later)

I will apologize in advance if the video is a bit of a hack job. The frame rate in the auditorium was pretty slow, probably as a result of having to render the 3D, stream the quicktime video feed and record both at the same time (roughly 6fps). The raw files were over 200MB's in size, which I then re-spun down to around 10MB's with a program called VirtualDub.

Tags: VON, Second Life