Mixed Reality Events

Observations on participation in MR events

Breaking the Game

"The symposium was conducted exclusively through a variety of telematic technologies: iChat, Skype, virtual walkthroughs, an online forum, and email."

"Troy McLuhan lands a full-sized, three-dimensional Lunar Excursion Module on the stage. While he is lecturing, the audience is also asking questions in chat and adding comments. Audience members also talk privately via IM, so as not to interrupt the presentation."

"Today, I am giving a TechTalk in Second Life on 'Virtual Environments and their effect on the Network'. We'll be using a combination of technologies to communicate today: - Text Chat (for intro and outro) - Integrated Voice Chat (for post-show socializing) - Streaming Audio/Shoutcast (for main presentation) - Images in an image viewer (poor facsimile of presentation)

"About 30 people attended the talk in Second Life, and a few others attended on IRC via a gateway. The lecture audio was delivered via a SHOUTcast streaming audio server. Used with Winamp and the SHOUTcast Source DSP plugin for Winamp, the SHOUTcast system permits piping voice to an audio stream that can be set as media URL and listened to by all participants. The performance of the streaming audio server and the quality of the audio stream were quite good, though some microphone volume issues on Anders' side and the annoying lag of about one minute."

"BCcampus is pleased to provide this document to conference attendees so everyone has a sense of how simultaneous face-to-face and virtual presentations will work at the Moodle Moot. A use case description is provided along with an AV setup diagram and quantities of equipment needed."

"More and more mixed reality events are taking place in Second Life. Usually the pattern is that a RL event will be transmitted to Second Life via a video stream and on the RL side there will be some terminal or video projection from inside Second Life. Common to most of these events is that there is only limited interactions between the two worlds is going on and I am wondering if this could be enhanced in some way."

"i’ve waxed and waned over the years on activity of blogging from conference session, but have found it refreshing to do 3 so far from the NMC Regional Conference at Tulane. At times, it helps to reinforce listening, but the act of trying to notate, look up URLs in other tabs, is tiring, especially for a poor typist like this dog . . . "