Mixed-Reality Party In DC and Second Life

Jerry23 writes "This Saturday The Happening will bring Second Life to first life. The Electric Sheep Company, a new metaverse developer, has virtually recreated R&B Coffee in Washington DC for use in a mixed-reality party and benefit for the DC art scene and several local nonprofits. Real people will mingle with avatars via realtime video projections in the real and virtual R&B spaces, and MAKE Magazine's Phillip Torrone will be on-hand showing off his homemade Virtual Reality headsets and gloves. The whole world is invited to attend in DC or Second Life, whichever's closer for you." This is just conceptually a weird idea to me.

Comments

Fantastic!

[ScentCone]

Since I live near DC, I can actively ignore, with extreme prejudice, both the online and the real-world pieces of this simultaneously! We live in amazing times.

Snowcrash

[Artie_Effim]

we are getting closer and closer to meat/meta-space duality. assuming you have read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowcrash.

Re:Snowcrash

[Red Flayer]

"Soon we'll be living in U-stor-its."

I live in California on $80,000 a year[1], where do you think I live, you insensitive clod?

Seriously, though, people do live in storage facilities. It's not legal, but it's the only option other than homelessness for some people.

[1] Not really. No one can afford to live in CA on $80k a year, even in a U-Stor-It.

maybe so

[revery]

This is just conceptually a wierd idea to me.

Maybe so, but your kids will love it.

Re:Uhhh, What??

[AKAImBatman]

1) What's "The Happening"?

Click on the link.

2) What's "Second Life"?

Click on the link.

3) What's "The Electric Sheep Company"?

Click on the link. (I suppose they should get brownie points for the Blade Runner/"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" reference.)

4) How are they developing Stephenson's "Metaverse"?

See the link to Second Life for more info.

5) What's "R&B Coffee"?

Damn good question.

6) What's a "Mixed Reality Party"

RTFSummary.

The New Reality

[airship]

This may be weird now, but get used to it. The future is the virtual overlaid on the real, and vice-versa. The lines are blurring. In twenty years, maybe even ten, it will be considered quaint and old-fashioned to make a distinction between the two.

Argh.

[Ketnar]

Well looks like they got slashdotted again.

I'm one of the guys doing the streaming video. (praying that the bandwidth at this shop is enough to do the job, which we check today in fact.) Thats about the reach of my involvment, show up, hook things up, point the camera so the people in VR can see/hear whats going on, provide the streamer and the bandwidth, etc. They just call us up when they need it done.

We also did the new york SLCC event (which was made problematic due to L3 and cogent crapping on each other at the same time),but it was more or less the same idea at the NY law school. Was actualy quite cool!

It sounds weird from the outside, but it's a neat trick to pull off. It's a very sureal connection when you have a copy of a real place with real people being shown in an exact copy of the same place in VR and vice versa. You have instances where people look back and forth at each other and wave or talk across a digital void. It's just not something you commonly see every day.

Think of it as a RL/VR two way mirror.

It also has its entertaining moments. For example, the VR streaker running by the VR camera wearing black censor bars in the middle of some linden's speech, projected in giant bold clarity beind them.

But aside from that, I just hope this shop isnt running some lame ISDN modem or something like that.

And now, for shameless plugging. Servercave.com, thats us. Yup. We do it for the advertizing, because we can. (Because last time, they didn't get our link up till nearly /after/ the event in NY.... ;)