jwilzewske: Second Life: Chamber Music Mixed Reality and Virtual Reality

A nshe Chung has all the elements of a good prospect for your nonprofit board – she’s a millionaire, a real estate mogul, and an innovative entrepreneur with an eye for design and aesthetic value. While ‘Anshe’ [is] an avatar—an on-line character in the virtual world of Second Life—her influence and her money [are] real [because there is a real human being behind the ‘Anshe’ character, spending real dollars and controlling real assets in real life (IRL) ].”
— Andrew Taylor, TheArtfulManager, ArtsJournal.

CMT: Cruxy, the media management company, has a new capability for serving up music on the virtual reality metaverse, Second Life (SL). Musicians who sign up for an account with Cruxy can embed MP3 tracks of their music into a player widget that will play ‘in-world’, promoting their work. If someone decides to buy your tracks in SL, they’re automatically redirected to your online Cruxy space where they complete their purchases and downloads. There’s a caveat, though: the Cruxy player widget is only installable on Second Life virtual land that you yourself own in SL or that’s owned by a group to which you belong. You can’t just hang it on your SL profile. You have to have ownership rights and privileges to add and edit items on the owned SL property. But with the exchange rate for Linden-dollars currently at about L$270 per US dollar, the cost of buying some SL property and setting yourself up is small. All things considered, this is a pretty cool widget that offers an advantage for the musicians who have a ‘presence’ in SL, to share their compositions or performances with others. The Cruxy widget would be helpful also, I think, for chamber music presenters and for musicians’ agents who establish SL islands or retail/promotional venues on the SL mainland or existing islands in SL.

DSM: As we’re speaking just now, there are more than 48,000 people logged into SL worldwide. Some of those people undoubtedly like classical music and buy classical music recordings and attend classical music events—or would do if they had more opportunities! This spring saw the first American classical orchestra performance in SL, simulcast with the actual concert, performed by Red {an orchestra}™ , conducted by Jonathan Sheffer in Cleveland. The concert was well attended, achieving its goal of expanding the classical music audience to a market segment who do not typically choose this genre. And Lang Lang debuted his new album in SL in May (see Second-Life Blog, 15-MAY-2007).

CMT: Second Life is a 3-dimensional, immersive, multiuser virtual environment where the entire world (meta-earth in meta-verse) is created by the participants (‘residents’). To date, almost 8 million people have joined and become residents—and have created virtual characters, or avatars, who can buy and sell property and create islands. What’s on the islands? Everything you can imagine - retail shops, casinos, libraries, movie theatres, university distance learning programs, municipal Chambers of Commerce, government agencies, even virtual refugee camps. If you’ve never tried it, Second Life can be an interesting experience. Second Life players can pretty much be lumped into two categories: Role Players, and Virtual Utopians. The Role Players are ones who come into the game preferring to pretend to be someone or some ‘thing’ other than they are In Real Life (IRL). It could be as simple as a change of race or gender, or as complicated as an alter ego or an animal or other lifeform, ordinary or fantastical. This is what Second Life was designed to be. There are lots of people who play as mythological creatures (there is a large Vampire subculture) or warrior like characters. There are also accompanying SL parameter settings and motion/gesture scripts that define role-localized animations for these various fantasy creatures.

DSM: Unfortunately, besides the fantasy role play, there’s also a subculture of sexual role play in SL. A lot of people who are probably decent upstanding citizens IRL like to role play all sorts of sexual fantasies in SL. Escorts and strippers are pretty frequently seen if you roam around in-world. You have of course your garden-variety sexual role players, types who are prevalent enough so that—even if you’re just a casual explorer in SL—you’ll run into various props and nude residents engaged in various physically intimate acts. Another related subculture is the Goreans or ‘master-slave’ role players. Yet another sub-subculture related to these is ‘ageplay,’ where a submissive SL player takes the role of a child. This is disturbing stuff, and it’s deservedly receiving increasing attention from law enforcement organizations.

CMT: By contrast, the Virtual Utopians in SL portray themselves in-world more or less as they are IRL—or, more typically, as idealized versions of their real selves. Among the current ‘residents’ of SL, they are mostly 20-somethings with SL avatars with idealized bodies, hair, makeup and clothing. Virtual Utopians often use Photoshop CS3 and Blender or Maya or Avimator or other software tools to create an avatar for themselves that closely resembles their appearance IRL. They buy virtual clothing to match their real-life tastes and personalities. They may use CyberExtruder or one of the other services that can apply a head-on, frontal ‘face’ jpeg photograph of themselves to the face of their SL avatar, so their entire appearance in SL is consistent with who they are IRL.

DSM: And Virtual Utopians tend come to SL for serious, real and durable reasons, mostly to meet people, or make money, or collaborate on charitable activities, or engage in conversations and shared experiences with other real people. Like the Red classical concert in April or the Magnatune classical music domain—they login to SL to listen together with friends to the same concert at the same time and then chat about it afterward, even though they’re hundreds or thousands of kilometers apart from each other and many kilometers from where the performance was taking place.

CMT: The sound quality in SL and the Cruxy add-in widget is pretty decent. Not equal to SACD discs or the highest bitrate MP3 sampling, but pretty decent. And the experience is much more participative than streaming video or webradio. You can see and interact with the other attendees. Whispering, for example, is audible within a certain range to other users in SL, so you have people ‘shushing’ other people who make noise during the in-world SL performances, just like you have IRL. A reasonably wide (and growing) range of real-world behavior occurs . . .

DSM: The fact that the BVH avatar scripting and the simulated 3D physics of the gestures and motions are still so rudimentary in SL means that it’s obvious when you’re interacting with another real human being. The human ‘presence’ is obvious, and it’s clear that you’re interacting with another human and not a scripted ‘bot’.

CMT: From the standpoint of someone like a musician or a chamber music presenter who’s interested in building and maintaining a mainstream metaverse in SL for sales/marketing purposes, it’s the Virtual Utopian view that should be emphasized. The Role Players don’t have to be persuaded to use a ‘metaverse’ like SL. But the vast majority of the population are not Role Player types. And the vast majority of the people who you want to attract to your SL site—the people from whom you have a reasonable chance of converting ‘hits’ to ‘orders’—are Virtual Utopians. And therein lies the ‘rub’ for all organizations who want to be successful virtual world companies in SL. If you really want to see growth and significant revenues, you have to sell your classical music content/product to the Virtual Utopian users out there in SL.

DSM: Yes. It’s one thing for big employers and universities to use SL for recruiting and for distance learning courses and so on: they have a large demand; far more people who ‘need’ what they have than there are seats to fill. But classical music artists and agents and presenters will be addressing a much lower-demand market: people don’t ‘need’ what there is on-offer; there are more classical music performance seats to fill than butts willing to fill them; and people must be wooed and enticed to allocate some of their time and money to choose the product/experience.

Example SLurl, Virtual Butt in Seat, in Magnatune Classical salon, Kula 1 island

CMT: Well, although the ‘search’ capabilities in SL are adequate, I wouldn’t count on ‘active user searching’ to drive adequate volume toward your classical music SL store-front or island. And, in order to provide your classical music friends and customers with a convenient way to teleport directly to your location (and be spared the annoying encounters with the gamers and possible exposure to unwelcome sexual content), you want a direct link. You probably should utilize direct links into your SL location from your other media—your website, your blog, your other online sites and ads, SMS, and your print and broadcast media. A ‘SLurl’ is a direct SL teleport link to your location in Second Life. If your audience members have Second Life installed on their PCs, then clicking on the SLurl link that you embed in your website or blog or publish in your hardcopy advert will automatically teleport them directly to that SL location in-world. Why use a SLurl? In addition to allowing customized control over mapping locations in Second Life, a SLurl also provides a better experience for web users who don’t (yet) have Second Life. Instead of getting an error when clicking on web links that begin with ‘secondlife://’, visiting a SLurl link gives the non-SL user a chance to sign up for a free SL account and see and hear and buy your content or a ticket to your event, either in-world or IRL.

DSM: I agree. By using a SLurl, you can insure that your classical music image and brand remain classy, and are not marred by the extraneous and sleazy stuff in SL areas that are far away from your domain. And the instant teleporting to your location in SL is a major time-saving ‘ease-of-use’ convenience for your visitors—particularly ones who are new or who don’t use SL frequently and are not very quick or efficient in navigating SL. But, more than that, it’s important to note that even many of the large commercial companies and mega-popular brands and retailers are not getting many hits in SL yet—so there’s no basis for any classical music organization or artist to expect that establishing a presence in SL will, in and of itself, bring in a large volume of visitors. Unless you’re already experiencing thousands of hits per day on your regular website and seeing moderately good rankings of your content in Technorati and Del.icio.us and Digg, then you won’t probably have many people seeking you out in SL. So, to get visit volume and conversions in your SL domain ‘destination’, you’re going to have to escort your visitors there from your website or your other ‘origination’ media. A SLurl link is the simplest way to do that. Alt-Zoom!

DSM Auer on SL mainland, visiting Beethoven region

CMT: This is a situation not unlike brick-and-mortar companies putting up websites in 1996, say. Those companies (or their ad agencies and web developers) thought that all they needed to do was give the user something pretty to look at. Most of them merely replicated much of the imagery and text content from their existing ads and brochure/catalog copy. They didn’t do much that was valuable or interactive. They didn’t use their websites to offer the user capabilities that the user couldn’t get elsewhere. Eventually, many of them ‘got it’ and began to use their websites to leverage the capabilities of the Web to provide value to visitors to their site that could not be had elsewhere. So now we see the same thing happening again in SL: companies think they will benefit from an SL presence, but their previous experience gives them no guide as to what such a presence requires of them. They come into it as a ‘Corporation’ that has a presence in SL, not as SL ‘Residents’ who work for a company. They put up lame, passive adverts, basically. People who’ve been residents of SL for a while—and even newbies—don’t and won’t go to go to SL to passively listen. In fact, if you do go to SL and sit around or stand around not doing anything and not interacting, SL will time-out and log you off.

DSM: The people who are residents of SL expect and demand to interact with other real residents’ avatars in dynamic, realistic ways! Chamber music presenters and artists who decide to establish a presence in SL need to understand this! And they should specifically avoid contracting with the dinosaur ad agencies to help them create their SL domain. The traditional ad agencies don’t understand SL—they will burn through your money and give you a lame, passive SL experience that’s as bad as what they did for your website in 1996. The only way for an organization to succeed in a sustainable way in SL is to offer actual, personal interaction—instead of just plunking down a passive 3D billboard or store-front. You need to vet your SL consultant or web developer carefully, to be sure they understand what delivering value in SL really means.

Wall Street Journal article on SL, 20-JUN-2007

T he dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.”
— Willa Cather.

jwilzewske

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Second Life: Chamber Music Mixed Reality and Virtual Reality

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