SLCC Photo and Commentary Thread

Post SLCC commentary, photos, or links to Flickr here, please.

How about in-world, watching the video stream? The funniest part was at least one person sitting here admitted to being at the SLCC, in-world, watching the video stream.





We're trying to figure out which of the panelists are wearing flexiprim hair...

Lewis

It is a bit odd that you guys are watching it in a random theater, when they have a huge 4 sim corner ampitheater set up with bunches of avies, that is suppossed to be the epicenter of the event, yet none of the sims have the media set. The huge 4 tv's are blank, and we are all watching it in quicktime seperatly.

This theatre was the only one listed in events. Where's the other?

There's a huge stage and stadium in the center of the 4 sims, where a ton of resi have been for hours, including flipper, and 2 slcc hosts.

Is the video still going?? Mine ended when they broke for lunch and hasn't come back up yet.

Nobody knows what's going on with the stream.

Well, according to the agenda, lunch should have ended a few minutes ago. They did go 15 minutes over on the last talk though, so maybe they extended lunch. Or, maybe they forgot to turn the stream back on when they came back, or maybe they're having technical difficulties, or maybe the big one just hit SF, or maybe the whole convention got kidnapped by aliens.

EDIT: I restarted QT, and it came back up. If anyone's still unable to see it, try restarting.

It's not "some random theatre", it is something I have built specifically for these purposes, of having a comfortable, realistic environment to enjoy streaming media and live music within Second Life.

I created an event, and people have come along to enjoy the atmosphere I have created for them, because they found it a more enjoyable experience than the lag caused in the 4 sim amphitheatre which you describe. As well as enjoying being 'part of the convention', we are able to comment and discuss the things mentioned at the SLCC that otherwise would have been a distraction in person. I know of at least one person in our audience who is actually at the SLCC but is preferring to spend time in-world watching the presentation here with us.

There is no "rule" that you must only enjoy this experience either in person or at the set location, after all. It is a community event, and the community must therefore participate in whichever way it feels it can. This is my contribution.

Lewis

It's just come back up. It appears they are running late.

Lewis

Down boy, I wasn't attacking you, the "random" just meant that it wasn't officially related to SLCC, it's a random theater a user set up in world. I was pointing out how the SLCC coordinators need to set the stream to their stadium. Right now it's far from a "mixed reality" event.

It's very mixed here. One of our audience, who is at the SLCC, went and stood in front of the camera about 15 minutes ago before the event started and waved at us.

You can't get much more mixed than that.

Lewis

That's wonderful Lewis, great for you, however you seem to be ignoring the part that your not involved in the event. Your running your own event, which is perfectly ok. However, the fact is there were 4 sims donated for the event, with hours of work done on them, lots of advertising, and there is 0 in world content going on right now in those sims. The streams aren't even set.

Plus, just because you got someone to wave at the screen doesn't mean it's "Mixed Reality" right now it's totally 1 way communication. Even the 2 "hosts" that are at the main stage are having trouble getting information from the RL side.

And we can't get more mixed reality then someone waving at the screen? How about having these speakers avies logged in world on the stage sitting in the same order they are rl. Or atleast having some inworld presence other then an empty sim.

Many of those issues I suggest you take up with the conference organisers, rather than laying into me for providing an alternative which is working. There are many other things I could be doing today, but I am sitting here in SL because of the rules that you have to be present when hosting an event. At the end, this will be 5 hours of additional SL time when I could have been doing other stuff.

Lewis

HEYYY look at me, im in the back corner! wooo!

Does anybody know if the video of SLCC interviews and panel sessions will be available online? Or anybody have a transcription of the speakers' comments? In particular, I'm really interested in the closing Q&A with Cory and Philip and their discussion about "building the next reality." Thank you, all!

Hi there
Did my best with my observations from the SLCC video stream once I got a small child to make it work for me.

I have blogged it at
http://www.secondlifeinsider.com

I am terribly afraid I didn't get the question and answers after the keynote speeches because I tried to get them up on the blog asap.
bws
Cali

I also made a little summary of the keynote which is mostly about opening up SL. It's up on my blog. Not sure I got everything right though, so please correct me where I am wrong (as it's 3am here)

Well I was there, though I took no photos. Here are some stream-of-consciousness thoughts from an ordinary SL resident (I own no businesses, islands, or other major stake in SL)

First let me preface by giving major kudos to the conference organizers, who I'm sure worked countless thankless hours to put this event together. Whatever glitches or disappointments may have occurred, organizing any sizeable event is a feat in and of itself and should be commended.

So, I arrived Friday night just before the live music was set to begin. The drinks were flowing a'plenty and appetizers were to be had. However none of these could be brought into the auditorium. The seats were comfy, the stage spacious and the sound decent, but very few people stayed in the auditorium for long listening to the quite-excellent musicians, which was a shame. The music was piped into the lobby, but the more people entered the lobby (which I went back to for a time) the harder it got to hear the music. I didn't know anyone so felt out of place, until Shelter co-owner Lars Bismark was kind enough to see my loneliness and invite me to his table, where I also met some other nice people including Wilder Linden. Thanks Lars!

Anyway, it was great to see some performers I'd seen in-world: Astrin Few, Frogg Marlowe (awesome hair!!) and Jaycatt Nico. Frogg and Jaycatt playing Freebird while we waved our lit cell phones/PDAs and tossed beach balls around = priceless. Cylindrian Rutabaga was also excellent (and also most awesome hair). I will have to check her out in-world. I didn't see the remaining performers until the quite funny singalong at the end.

Saturday, someone should have warned that the Fogg Fest limited access to Fort Mason. Then again, maybe as a local traveling on foot I was one of the only ones who normally cut through the meadow to get to the piers where the conference was. Anyway, got there in time to snarf some breakfast (continental fruit-and-pastry fare) before watching some well-done and touching Machinima on the personal aspects of SL. Then Mitch Kapor's presentation, which was quite interesting and occasionally humorous, and the RL business panel which provided additional insights.

Lunch: Grabbed the first vegetarian box I saw - fresh mozzarella cheese sandwich, with pasta salad and small dessert, quite yummy. Unfortunately there were only a dozen or so chairs in the lobby, and food wasn't allowed in the audiotorium, and the chilly-even-for-san-francisco-summer weather made eating outside unpleasant. I ended up ducking into one of the other buildings, where I had to go for my voice lesson at 1:30 that afternoon anyway.

So I missed a couple of sessions, but when I returned at 2:30 the sex panel was still going on, and I got to see the live "teledildonics" demo which was priceless. More machinima - again quite well done - then panels on branding and media. The former topic didn't interest me particularly; the latter, I felt the panel didn't quite all agree on the role of media (written materials) in SL, but it seems that the tools to provide a better experience in that regard should be coming along.

The keynote (only 45 minutes late, but who's counting?). Philip's anecdotes of tearing his house down to make a vertically-sliding door were amusing, as was Cory's demo of ancient Linden World, where landscaping was achieved by gunfire. I was disappointed that the only question relayed from in-world regarded what type of pie Philip preferred; I know this is an in-joke, but I have a feeling more substantial questions from our on-line friends were queued to be answered.

I did not stay for the Secondcast panel so can't comment on that, and won't be attending tomorrow's special sessions. Overall, a good experience, and I'm glad it was held in my home city so I didn't have to deal with airline travel.

Thank you so much for that detailed summary! Nice of you to post. You ARE so lucky to be in the same city. I hope they have it closer to me so I can drive next year (unlikely). I do so fear planes...and snakes.

I was at SLCC yesterday and today. So far it's been pretty good experiece for all who have not been to one. I am by far not a social butterfly but my girlfriend is Hethr Engel. We have met some great people there with some great conversations. I find it interesting to actually meet the person behind the avatar. Even though some hide behind their character it's amazing to me how much they relate to each other.

We had a great time Friday drinking it up, meeting people, and listening some tunes. Though I must admit at first when I arrived I had no idea what to expect. When walking along the hallway to the SLCC I got a feeling like it was a high school reunion, very strange. Once things started to get going it was great. The funny thing was that the standard name badges were very hard to read, so you would see everybody walking by trying to squint to see who you are. I also know this is a little weird but I never really put a person in my mind behind the Lindens, execpt for Phillip.

Saturday was a lot more structured with schedules and timelines. Hethr and I didn't arrive until 11 for the RL business in SL. The first thing I noticed was there were a lot more people there than the night before. All the topics were pretty interesting and informative, if there was not something you were interested you could always go out to the lobby area and mingle among the residents. I must say the lunch was great, I was in adventurous mood and ate the tuna sandwich.

Not trying to be a Linden Fan Boy, but I must say Phillip is a great speaker. I believe if he did speaches every week in SL more people would have peace of mind. Well... maybe that's asking too much. In Phillips speech and Cory demostration, Linden Labs are looking at the future of SL a lot primarily of scaling. Because of this giant influx of growth of the population it is starting to become a giant task to "police" the residents. According Phillip, their plan is to give us the tools to implement our own investigations and enforcement of land, griefing, and fraud management. He gave a brief example such as textures in general, if you are the owner I believe he suggested that you could see who is using it and for what purpose. I'm not sure if this will work, but I can only hope.

Phillip also reassured that their goal is to fix SL, concerning scalability and stability. The big problem is they are going in deep into the SL code that has been in core since 2001 and rewriting it. Because of this you can assume some problems we are having. I can't remember the exact number but I believe he said 20 out 27 developers are working on fixing SL.

Because they are re-writing some of SL code, they will open SL up more to developers to the SL API. Some examples such as Cory said were language translators and Phillip suggested we will sometime be able to im people in world. Even further Phillip says he envision that one should be able to manage object on their land such as update scripts without even logging in.

I see a lot of big visions and big dreams. I'm not sure if it can be done but at least it's going forward.

Unable to get there in RL, I can only comment on the in-world arm of the experience, to which I was looking forward. A superb surreal build promised mutiple video screens, being pumped information along organic artery-like ducting, with innovative seating perches on huge monolithic steel slabs. Centred at a four-sim junction to share the load.

A immersive feast of an experience, as visually rich and bizarre as you could wish.

Except that it didn't seem to happen, at least on Saturday afternoon.

I am afraid that all the good work towards the in-world event was wasted. It seems that the ship was spoiled for lack of a ha'porth of tar.

Even near the end of the day, only Cirque had the media stream set. But clearly the video screen was not set to the media texture, so all one got was the sound.

The other 3 sims had no stream set. So not one of the four video screens around which the fine build was constructed worked all afternoon as far as I could see. Presumably true of the morning too.

Many people pointed this out repeatedly, but nothing was (could be ?) done. We were simply told to load the url directly into our out-of-world media players, and watch it there, which most did. What in-world experience was that ?

The only hint of an explanation was something about "server load". Not relevant to the video stream of course, as the sim servers are uninvolved (video comes directly to your client) and the stream servers themselves were not in difficulty, as they were in fact coping fine with all the direct viewing.

So there was actually no in world experience, and the only point in being there was the backchat and socialisation by those not concentrating on the stream in the first place..

I don't want to be unkind, but it is hard not to conclude that no-one competent had been given the responsibility and ability to set the media streams, and given the videoscreen texture, or the permissions to change it. Given that minimal forethought, all it takes is two clicks in "about land", type in the url, and set the same texture as the builder put on the video screens.

I know it is often frowned upon not to keep clapping the organizers for what worked well (eg the RL experience). We are supposed to just keep quiet about what did not.

But the people who could not make it to SF deserved better. And so did the builders of the superb video arena.

Unless this debacle resulted from some unpredictable technicality which escapes me (and I have really scratched my head to think what it could be) I have to sadly conclude that what was meant to be an immersive in-world experience was destroyed through lack of just a little forethought.

Either you believe that such immersion is valuable, and that dual-reality events are worthwhile or you don't.

I do. I was VERY disappointed.

What's annoying is - all that effort went down the drain for something it would have been so easy to get right. All the difficult bits were done superbly. Congratulations are due all round except that the last, easiest link in the chain simply never got connected up.

Well well well.

Just thought I'd go check if things have improved in the SLCC build since yesterday.

It seems Buddy Sprocket has taken things into his own hands, and good for him.

Three sims still have the stream unset. All four sims have the original video screens still dead.

But Varnish now has a (the ?) stream set, and a new videoscreen set up below the original one, presumably by Buddy (the owner). Presumably he has permissions for the land media settings (praise be), but not the texture for the original screens. So they remain unusable, and the life pulsing into them through the arteries of the build remains impotent.

The new screen looks set up to display the Education discussion (says so on it). The url seems different from the "breakfast" one, which currently gives me 404. Is this a new url ? Has it been publicized ? Is there a statement anywhere telling us what will be streamed today ?

So someone has taken a belated positive step at last, though sadly for immersion the new screen below the dead one looks out of context and a bit incongruous. But well done Buddy. I'll try to come watch if I can get away from some sunday visiting relatives.

The dead screens belong to Moon Adamant. I wonder if she/he could make them workable by giving Buddy their texture to put into the land media settings ? It's not quite too late. It would only take a minute........

The programme says 'streamed in-world on Saturday', no mention of anything for Sunday, so we may not actually have anything to watch. It appears that it is a series of smaller 'discussion groups' in various venues, and presumably rather than deciding which out of the concurrent events to stream in world, the decision was taken to stream none.

I may be wrong, it's happened before... but that's what it appear to me anyway.

Lewis

hmmm..

Maybe Buddy knows something we don't, Lewis. He certainly seems to have a video screen set up ready in Cirque, and I think a graphical display board too, loaded with slides and graphics with the right looking names.