Re: [tlug] Instructions for Attending the tech meeting in Second Life

["emiddleton@example.com" <emiddleton@example.com>]

Curt Sampson wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Nov 2007, emiddleton@example.com wrote:
>
>> If we can get it working seamlessly so that the slides and demos display
>> quickly and the voice is clear then it is potentially less fiddly on the
>> client end.
>
> I dunno. VNC is not terribly hard to install and use, probably easier
> than Second Life, and if we can stream the video in a Flash (or maybe
> QuickTime) format, I think most users will already have the software,
> as opposed to having to install Second Life. As well, the Second Life
> client seems to be a bit more limited under Linux; does it do video yet?

My understanding was the current Linux client supports quicktime video
and audio just not person to person voice chat.  I have not however
tested the video.  My Linux amd64 install experience was.

wget
http://s3.amazonaws.com/download-secondlife-com/SecondLife_i686_1_18_4_3.tar.bz2
tar -xjvf SecondLife_i686_1_18_4_3.tar.bz2
cd SecondLife_i686_1_18_4_3
./secondlife

obviously YMMV.

>> The big issue with IRC, as I see it, is that it distracts from the
>> presentation. If we reserved IRC for questions to the speaker and have
>> someone relaying the questions it might work better.
>
> That is the standard way of doing it at every presentation I've ever
> seen that accepted questions from the net.

I have seen both, and have listened to speakers bitch about the audience
laughing for no apparent reason because some heckler has posted
something funny on IRC.

>> I guess one of the hopes of using something like Second Life was that
>> we would give a sense of presence to/for remote participants.  
>
> Personally, I find that watching a real person move about and talk on
> a small, flat screen gives me much more of a sense of presence than
> watching a cartoon character stand and do nothing on a small, flat
> screen.

I was referring to presence of all the participants not just the speaker.

This was a first go at using SL in a tech meeting, done under rather
extreme time constraints, and obviously not everything was perfect.  It
is obviously not ideal to have 'a cartoon character stand and do nothing
on a small, flat screen' but it is no more ideal then to have a speaker
do the same.  This is irrespective of whether you use SL or RL.  It is
possiable for an avatar to move around gesture and respond to an
audience, it is just hard to do this if you are trying to simultaneously
make a presentation in RL.  This relates to the issue I mentioned
before, if using SL in the future, we should decide whether it is a
presentation in SL to RL or RL to SL.  If it is going to be from RL to
SL, it would probably be better to have video of the presenter streamed
into SL because the presenter is going to have difficulty controlling
his avatar while concentrating on his RL presentation.  We could of
course have a puppeteer controlling his avatar ;)  If we are going from
SL to RL then it probably makes more sense to have a presenter and
observer avatar.

I wonder how hard it would be to stream a vnc session directly to a
quicktime stream, or ideally a vnc session merged with a stream
containing the presenter and audience so that it could be all pulled
from the same stream.

Edward