Musical events ... something missing.

This isn't exactly a feature suggestion from me, but more of a worry that something rather important is missing but I don't know exactly what ... perhaps someone has a feature suggestion that would help?

The problem: I attended the BBC Radio 1 musical event on the BBC quad island over the weekend --- an in-world live broadcast of the concert being held in Dundee, UK. No doubt it will be reported as a success, both from the Beeb's point of view and LL's. But was it?

What actually happened? Well, live audio from the concert was broadcast over their land, and some sort of video was provided on the large stage screen. Only a rather small percentage of people could actually see the latter; for most of us, Quicktime would go into its buffering state for a few minutes, but then stop and never actually display anything, so I don't actually know what was showing, although it was probably the BBC concert TV feed.

Anyway, that wasn't the problem as such. The problem was that nothing memorable actually happened in-world, not even in our minds. People turned up, listened to music and maybe saw some video, turned on some dance animations which were entirely uncorrelated with the event, and that's it. Chat was plentiful, but largely about non-concert topics like UK soccer. At least half of those present seem to have just sat back and went AFK, from what we could see.

In other words, it was identical to what happens at just about every music event: a bit of music, some chat, and /dance. Is that it? Is that the sum total of "live" musical interaction in SL? Well it had better not be, or the future is grim.

So, what's needed? Well, I'm not really sure, but surely a LIVE event is defined as having some interaction between performers and the audience, don't you think? If this were a proper RL-SL crossover event, the bands in Dundee should have seen us on-screen at least, and heard us clapping!

Was there any attempt to hook an SL client into the stage projector in Dundee? I didn't hear of any such thing. What about applause? We can generate sounds in SL, how about someone sorting out an applause generator based on rate of clicking or 0-10 rate box touches or something, and let performers hear it?

Anyway, I won't continue because I don't have any strong suggestions in this area.

However, I do know that something just isn't working ... the enjoyment level of events where selecting an avatar animation represents the highlight of the day is so low that the phrase "waste of time" comes to mind. We need something better, but what?

I didn't attend and I don't know much about this, but it seemed to be a live listening party, which is slightly different than many of the regular SL live music events, where there is interaction between artists and audience.

As for improving anything, if you don't know what you want to have happen, I certainly can't know what you want.

Certainly, the applause wouldn't have been enough. What did you want to have happen?

I was hoping you could tell me. Somebody had better have some ideas for adding depth.

A low-quality version of Internet radio plus /dance is, I suspect, not the full extent of the engrossing and immersive virtual world concert experience with which Philip would like to attract new subscribers, investers, and media companies. The problems isn't really specific to this event though: /dance seems to be the sum total of so many events that it probably points to a general lack of alternatives for social gatherings.

We're the content creators here, in theory. A better experience has to start with somebody having some better ideas.

And I'm sure that someone does. It's a bit early to just shrug, point to empty brain, and give up already.

Like I said, I think the more traditional live music event in SL is a different experience. It is a more intimate. There is interaction between the artist and the audience.

Are you looking for a better virtual recreation of the concert experience or are you shooting for something totally foreign to the current concept of a concert?

It would be nice if /dance could be replaced with something a bit more active, in which people could express themselves in the same way they do dancing IRL. The only problem is that a script to allow anything like that would almost inevitably cause unusable lag in an event with any number of people. (Seeing as how that can be caused by just wearing inactive attachments, all of those people having scripts that were actually doing things could only be worse. )

Other than that, the main problem is that in RL being able to socialise with such a large group of people at once is unusual; in SL it's the norm.

You meant the other way around, I assume. In RL it's the norm to socialize with a large number of people, and in SL it's hard because of lag beyond just a few dozen, and totally impossible beyond the server limit which is well short of an RL crowd.

SL will need to dramatically redesign the way it performs avatar rendering before we are able to have anything like an RL mass public event experience.

Addendum: Yes on your first point too. The ability to handle scripts and attachments efficiently is so poor at the moment that it cripples any kind of decent mass event handling. /dance seems cute when you first see it, but after weeks and months and then years, one's appreciation of it moves through indifference, boredom and then loathing. We do need better, but platform efficiency wouldn't seem to allow it.