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

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

Curt Sampson wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Nov 2007, Edmund Edgar wrote:
>
>> OK, well if we liked the concept today we could come up with another
>> way of
>> doing the sound in future; We don't necessarily have to use the
>> Second Life
>> voice client - or indeed put the sound through SL at all.
>
> Indeed. I'd suggest simply streaming the video and audio. We frequently
> do this at Japanese BSD user group meetings.

I think part of the issue is that we didn't really decide whether it was
going to be a presentation in real life streamed into Second Life, which
may work better as Curt suggested (with just a video and audio stream),
or a presentation in second life viewed from real life.

I think audio is a good idea but as Edmund pointed out, using the
speakers voice didn't work very well.  Perhaps if we have it projected
as background sound? that might work better.

>> The other thing to think about if we do do this again would be making
>> what
>> the speaker types into a terminal, and its output, appear in Second
>> Life. Is
>> there some kind of  simple terminal/screen/shell-related witchery we
>> could
>> use to capture whatever would normally be displayed in the presenter's
>> terminal in real-time so that we could send it to an object in-world?
>
> It would probably not be too difficult to write shim program that would
> insert a pty between a user and a shell session, and siphon off the
> output to be sent somewhere else. Or possibly you could even configure
> Gnu Screen to do this for you.
>
> However, I think that vnc would probably provide a better solution.
>
> I guess I'm not really seeing what Second Life gets us over video
> streaming, vnc for the slides and demos, and IRC or whatever for
> feedback from the remote people.

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 think for audience question IRC like messaging is the
only workable solution to avoiding audio feedback problems.  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.  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.  To me one of the most important
aspect of technical meetings is getting everyone physically together, if
technical meetings become just an adjunct to an IRC session that would
be disappointing.

Edward