How to set up a meeting room for regular virtual meetings in SL?

Hello everyone,

we are currently working on a proposal for a client,
and we planned to discuss the feasibility of setting up meeting rooms for clients in Second Life.
(We would like to use it as the platform of communication between the company and the client)
However, since we are all new to this virtual world, your assistance will be highly appreciately.
So here are the questions that we would like to ask experts like you guys:

(1) How to set up my own meeting room in Second Life? How long does it take, and how much $? (or it's for free?)
(2) Could we upload our PowerPoint slides and show the slides on the virtual screen within the virtual meeting room?
(3) Is it possible that the meeting room has the ability to document the dialogues made during the meeting?
(4) How do we relocate ourselves to that specific meeting room everytime we sign in?
(5) If inviting someone new to the meeting room, is it possible to provide a "link", so he/she could reach the meeting room directly.


Please let me know, thanks!

Here is my personal e-mail addy: [email]edwardni@gmail.com[/email]

-Ed

1) an experienced builder could build a decent meeting room in next to no time, certainly less than a working day - but you will need some land - depending on how big and how much privacy you want that will cost from the price of a Big Mac to a few hundred US$

2) not sure - at least I know it can be done, but the only way I know is fairly crude - involves taking screenshots and uploading them as textures - sure there's a better way

3) log chat or IMs and you will log everything

4) set your home to the room, or just have a landmark for it

5) you can give them a SLURL in an email or send them a landmark or TP in SL

Now some advice for your RL partners - it might be wise to find a company to work with that actually knows something about the method of communication it is suggesting. Most of those questions do not need an expert to answer, they could be answered by most people after 2 or 3 days inworld. Frankly, the level of these questions, except number 2, are about at the level of someone offering to set up a website after an hour's experience surfing the web.

SL has potential for virtual meetings, although I'm not sure that a straightforward video conference wouldn't be better, but before you try to use it, you really do need to learn a bit about the world.

ill try to answer
1)you will need land rent it or buy some it cost monthly to own linden land.
you can build your on building or buy one and plunk it down. or sit on cubes
2)powerpoint i dont think so (can powerpoint display in a webpage?)but you can show webpages on a prim or textures. you can script your own sliding textures
3)you can log chat in prefrences or write a script to log them to a webpage.
4)world > set home here.
5)http://slurl.com/build.php or if they ar in world send them a teleport

Since you have little experience in SL, I'll highly recommend that you check out the SL Solutions Provider Directory and get the assistance of one of the many individuals and companies who are experienced in setting up this sort of thing.

http://secondlife.com/solution_providers/listings.php

You would want either a Full Service provider or a Consultant. Check both categories, as both include the types of people you may need. I'm listed there myself as a Consultant, though I mostly do full-sim and multi-sim projects.

(1) How to set up my own meeting room in Second Life? How long does it take, and how much $? (or it's for free?)

Definitely NOT free. At the very least, you need a parcel of land to place your meeting room on. How much land depends on how big your meetings need to be. How long? Depends on what you need. A simple room and chairs can be set up in less than a day. A replica of your entire real-world office building, detailed down to the potted plants in the lobby, could take months to set up. (And would be overkill in most cases.)

SL is limited to 40 people at a time in a single sim, for all practical purposes. If you own your own sim, it is possible to crank this up to 100, but at that level no one can do anything effective. On a budget sim like a Homestead, limits are lower, like 20 people per sim.

So, let's say that you'll never need more than 10 people at a time in one of your meetings. You could rent 1/4 of a normal sim or 1/2 of a Homestead sim, and set up your meeting room on that rented land. It might cost you $80 USD per month or a bit more for that land rental.

Double those figures if you need 20 people at once, and rent 1/2 sim or an entire Homestead sim.

Above 20 people at a time, seriously consider buying your own sim. Set up cost is $1250 USD and maintenance cost is $295 USD per month.

Need 80 people? Technically you can put two sims side by side and have the meeting room on the border, with 40 people per sim. But there are practical limitations there, and you probably can not get all 80 people able to see and communicate with each other at once.

At the Second Life 5th birthday celebration, they set up a stage at the intersection of 4 sims, with the stage in one sim and audiance in three others, so technically could have 120 in the audiance and 40 on stage at once. (I don't think they ever successfully hit that peak, without crashing one or more of the sims.) They were using text chat, voice chat, and video presentations to communicate with the residents and take questions from the audiance.

All of the above quotes do NOT include any costs for building the conference room or equipping it with furnishings and presentation systems.


(2) Could we upload our PowerPoint slides and show the slides on the virtual screen within the virtual meeting room?

There are ways, but not completely seamless. SL does not yet support interactive HTML on a prim. You can display a static web page, but can't make the links on that page clickable. There are scripted systems available in SL where you can import your PowerPoint slides as textures and display them, one at a time, as fixed images. But you'll lose the animations and transition effects that PowerPoint can do.

SL also supports displaying video in-world, so you can set up a video stream hosted on your external web server, and a multimedia display in-world, and can display training videos or pre-recorded speeches in-world.

(3) Is it possible that the meeting room has the ability to document the dialogues made during the meeting?

Text chat can be logged, yes. Voice Chat and the streaming audio from multimedia can not be logged at this time, to my knowledge.

(4) How do we relocate ourselves to that specific meeting room everytime we sign in?

Set your home point to the meeting room location. Or just log out while in the room, and by default when you log in again, you'l still be in the room.

(5) If inviting someone new to the meeting room, is it possible to provide a "link", so he/she could reach the meeting room directly.

Yes, an SLURL is a type of Internet URL that can point to a specific location in SL. If they don't yet have an SL avatar account, a link on the map page that the SLURL directs them to in their web browser will allow them to create an account and then continue on directly to your designated location in SL. They have to download the client software to their computer to log in, of course.

Hi;
I have been investigating into virtual meeting rooms for some time and it is possible to do quite a lot, but you definitely need to take care about many aspects, which are not abvious in first place:

Here are some points, which IMHO are relevant besides what others have allready posted in this thread. You should take into account that:

1.) Every involved employee of your client needs to install the SL-viewer (or a compatible viewer)

2.) The SL-viewer might not get through the company firewalls... you need to check that!

3.) The client computers would need a certain quality, which is typically not given in business computers (i.e. take care of the graphics card and memory...)

4.) The number of virtual persons which can access your meeting room is limited. Be prepared that any number above 40 avatars at the same location will degrade the performance of your sim and all your client computers... More than 100 simultaneous Avatars at one location (sim) are not allowed at all. (not sure about the exact number of the limit, but 100 sounds like massive lag to me...)

5.) Expecting, your clients are not regular virtual world users, you need to give them a good starting point, so... take care to prepare some avatars for them, offer a registration service, even consider to introduce your client's company-name as avatar-surnames ( you can buy an avatar-namespace from LL, but that is quite expensive...)

6.) When you start doing virtual meetings, take care to guide your users. The ending of your project in success or in failure will be directly coupled to the way, how you introduce the project and what expectations you sell to the clients and to how much extent you can fullfill the expectations...

7.) About costs: that depends on many aspects either. I have been told, that about 2 years ago, companies had to pay about 50.000-100.000 US$ in order to get a "professional virtual space" in SL. Look at the big shots (IBM...), who have investigated multiple millions of dollars meanwhile (not only in meeting rooms but also in exploring the possibilities...) and as i know, they DO offer virtual space creations to their customers... And such projects cover much more than just building and scripting!!!

My personal opinion: IMHO the biggest amount of costs will have to be assigned into the question: "how to introduce the tool to the clients" and "developing reasonable workflows". Creating nice and unique environments is not the big problem. There are many builders and scripters around, who can do quite good jobs in astonishingly small time.

And how would i start such a project? I would certainly not try to make a big bang launch, but start slowly and with minimal effort. Use the voice chat and meet on your 500 m2 minimal SL land, maybe put 10 chairs in and add a video screen. thats it for the beginning. Once you get your clients on your side, evolve as needed...

I hope, you will be able to master your project.
good luck with that!
Hussayn

One other point: Unless you purchase your own sim and make it not Public Access, you will not have privacy for your meetings. Other SL residents will be able to listen to and observe your meeting, and you can not prevent that from happening. If you actually own a sim and make it not public, then you can control access and visibility, and only your invited people can come to the sim.

Dear Ceera, Hussayn, Lightwave, Wulfricm

Thank you for the time and effort explaining the details of how to set up a meeting room in Second Life. All the information you provided are valuable to our team.

Back to the questions you've asked about my needs of the meeting room,
the specifications of the meeting room I need are as follow:
(1) contains upto 20 person maximum
(2) for business purpose, so data security is the top concern
(3) we are not putting emphasis on details of the room, so we don't need anything that is irrevelent to hosting a meeting there (e.g. plants or fancy painting are not needed)
(4) we would show PowerPoint slides in the meeting room (text in the slides shall be clearly shown)
(5) conversation could mainly be in text, but voice chats is also needed.
(6) everyone could access the meeting room as long as they have the "Key" (or password)


I still have some questions regarding the virtual world (Second Life):
(1) What is a "Prim" in SL?
(2) What is a "Sim" stand for in SL? and what are the differences between "Normal sim" and "Homestead sim"?
(3) If I want to purchase a land, how do I identify which land is available and which one is not?
(4) Whom do I pay the money to?
(5) How much do I need to pay if renting a meeting room decribed above for a month
(6) I've heard that each new avatar is granted a piece of land for free, is that true? I didn't see it when I signed in.


Thank you all!

(1) 20 persons on a location is no problem

(2) all chat goes through the linden servers and i am pretty sure, they do not use encryption. So text chat is probably unsecure. Voice chat is passed inbetween the clients again through unencrypted connections. As long as everybody is sitting in an intranet, or connected via vpn that would be fairly secure.

(3) Why do you need a 3D environment for your meetings then ? For example we have installed a "secure remote access system" in my company, something with which you can create highly secure online meetings where you can share data, show ppt presentations, and much much more all fully encrypted and ready available... But well, its not SL, its a system for remote desktop sharing with high security according to the business standards... (But you probably have got other ideas in your mind and such options are not what you are looking for...)

(4)as allready pointed out SL does not allow third party integrations (which is ridiculous. IMHO usability of SL for meetings is not very high when you can NOT do that.

(5)SL supports both

(6)As long as you got your own island, you can use allow/deny lists to define exactly, who will be able to travel to your meeting room. As long as you rent only a part of a sim, you are highly iunsecure. Everybody can at least see, what you are presenting, but at least you are able to keep people from listening the text chat and listening the voice chat.

====


(1) What is a "Prim" in SL?

prim = "primitive" = atomic object for building

(2) What is a "Sim" stand for in SL? and what are the differences between "Normal sim" and "Homestead sim"?

sim=Simulator (or mostly called "island". SL is made out of 10-thousands of islands, each island is backed by one physical CPU. The linden main land consists of thousands of islands all connected together. In contrary to that private islands are non connected environments (each of virtual size 256*256 meters). Such an island is per default NOT connected to any other island. And it is surrounded by "water" (hence the name "island". You can join your Island with others to form a bigger estate (set of (connected) islands).

(3) If I want to purchase a land, how do I identify which land is available and which one is not?

go and look in the viewers search area. You will find land to rent, islands to purchase. All from private people or companies who have specialised in selling virtual land. In your case you would need either someone who sells an entire island (not renting, really selling!!!) or your best bet is to purchase an island directly from the LL.

(4) Whom do I pay the money to?

as said in (3)

(5) How much do I need to pay if renting a meeting room decribed above for a month

You can ask my friend "Gaia Clary". She has controll over our private islands, she agreed in offering you an entire SIM or a land parcel for a month or 2 for experimenting with it. Send an IM to her if you are interested. (I am almost not present in SL at the moment, so Gaia is the better adress hint: You also can discuss a lot about intercomunication possibilities (RL-SL) with her. She knows quite a lot about that on the SL side...

(6) I've heard that each new avatar is granted a piece of land for free, is that true? I didn't see it when I signed in.

No, thats not true. you are granted the right to purchase a cheap... piece of 512 sqm on the main land "as long as available". As long as i can remember, there was never enough mainland available, so i was never able to rent "cheap" mainland. In your case mainland is no option anyways (security!)

regards,
Hussayn

It would probably be best if you do a little homework by reading background materal in the SL Support Center first, and then coming here to ask specific questions related to building. This forum is really intended as a place to ask about how to build things in SL, not about many of the broader issues you are interested in. The Support Center is at .

(1) contains upto 20 person maximum

That is half the occupancy capacity of a normal simulator, or the full capacity of a lower-cost "Homestead" sim.

(2) for business purpose, so data security is the top concern

Then you would want to be using an isolated "island" sim, and not renting or purchasing a Mainland parcel of land. A Homestead sim that is not connected directly to any other sim is the best choice, provided the sim owner that you would be renting it from will rent you the entire 256 M by 256 M area and set it as "not public access" for you, allowing you to control the access list to your rented area completely as an Estate Manager.

(3) we are not putting emphasis on details of the room, so we don't need anything that is irrevelent to hosting a meeting there (e.g. plants or fancy painting are not needed)
(4) we would show PowerPoint slides in the meeting room (text in the slides shall be clearly shown)
(5) conversation could mainly be in text, but voice chats is also needed.
(6) everyone could access the meeting room as long as they have the "Key" (or password)

So, what does being in a 3D environment gain for you then? There are plenty of commercial-quality software packages and services designed for business that will let you share presentations, videos, audio and text chat, in a more secure manner, and with thousands of invited attendees at once. Webex, Lotus Sametime, and similar applications or services would nbe far more secure, give you better readability on your Powerpoint slides, and cost less. Honestly, I think Webex would serve you far better than Second Life.

I still have some questions regarding the virtual world (Second Life):
(1) What is a "Prim" in SL?

A basic building block for making the 3D stuff you see in Second Life. For example, a simple realistic wooden chair with two back slats might take 4 prims for the legs, two for the seat and seat cushion, and 4 more for the back and back slats. Or a more simple chair, though harder to initially create, might be molded out of a single prim, using what we call "sculpted prims". Each thing that you need to see or interact with, such as your chairs, table, presentation screen, walls floor, ceiling, door - they each require at least 1 prim to represent in the 3D simulation.

Prims are allocated in the simulator based on how much land area you control in that simulator, either by owning or renting that land. A 512 M2 parcel of land, 32 Meters by 16 Meters in size, has an allocation of 117 prims, on a normal simulator. Homestead sims have 1/4 as mant prims available per square meter, and are designated for "light use" applications.

(2) What is a "Sim" stand for in SL? and what are the differences between "Normal sim" and "Homestead sim"?

Sim = Simulator : A 256 Meter by 256 Meter area of land represented as a 3D virtual environment, with a usable vertical area of 4096 Meters, the lowest 20M of which is usually "below the water line".

A normal sim supports 15,000 prims and 40 users in the sim at once, and runs 1 sim per server CPU core. It costs $1,250 US dollars up front and $295 US Dollars per month to own your own private full-sized sim.

A "Homestead" sim supports 3,750 prims and 20 users maximum, and runs 4 homestead sims to a single server CPU Core. Homesteads are for light-use applications, like a private get-away island or water offshore for boating, or for uses that don't need the resources of a full sim, like your proposed 20-person conference room. But to obtain a Homestead sim from Linden Lab, you have to already own a full-sized sim. The cost is less up front and less per month than a full sim, but the cost per prim available to use is higher.

(3) If I want to purchase a land, how do I identify which land is available and which one is not?
(4) Whom do I pay the money to?

Linden Lab will directly sell you a full sim, if you want. For smaller areas of land, the existing sim owners or land owners can offer that land for sale, and the search tool in Second Life can help you to locate available parcels.

Unless you are buying a whle sim, or purchasing a parcel of land on the major continents, referred to as "The Mainland", then you'll have another SL Resident as your "Landlord", and you will pay that resident. If you buy a whole sim from Linden Lab, or if you purchase a Mainland parcel of land, you pay Linden Lab directly for your monthly fees.

(5) How much do I need to pay if renting a meeting room decribed above for a month

Depends a lot on what you get, and where. My guess would be that for half a sim, you'd be looking at roughly $160 US dollars a month.

(6) I've heard that each new avatar is granted a piece of land for free, is that true? I didn't see it when I signed in.

Old news, obsolete since 2006. It used to be that a new Premium member could obtain, almost for free, one 512 M2 parcel of land on the Mainland for just L$512, (about two dollars US), and could own that land for free thereafter, with no monthly fees owed. In 2006 the "First Land" program was discontinued. Premium members still get free monthly rent on their first 512 M2 parcel of land, if they buy land on the mainland, but they have to pay whatever the market rate is to obtain that land from the current owner, who would be another Resident.

For the purposes you propose, I would think that Mainland would not work for you. There is absolutely NO way to secure the meeting room to prevent strangers from watching and listening to your meeting and presentation on the Mainland. Only a non-public private island sim (regular or homestead) would meet your security requirements. And even then, you'll need to be in control of the entire sim, even if you're renting it from another resident. If you were to rent half a sim, and someone else was renting in the other half, those strangers in the other half would have full access to all the information in your meetings.