It was about what I expected. The execution was very good, but I still can't get past the clunky interface of Second Life itself.
I was impressed with how organized the hosts were. Air University has built some pretty stunning virtual facilities across a series of islands. The auditorium was large with lots of seating and good views of the screens from almost everywhere, despite SL's clunky camera controls. I automatically received a "welcome kit" when I logged in, which contained SL game objects (such as an event T-shirt) and documents relevant to the presentations. All the presenters had arrived early and were gathered at the front of the auditorium. They did their technology checks early and started on time. I have a poor Internet condition here, so I didn't expect the voice chat to work well, but it was surprisingly good. The briefers were loud and clear. They had PowerPoint presentations with embedded video, which was projected on in-game screens. I believe there was a tour of various AF and NASA facilities after the lectures, but I logged out well before that and went to bed. Overall, the organizers really tried to put on an excellent event within the confines imposed by the game world.
With that said, I still find Second Life immensely frustrating. For the most part, I felt that the virtual world technology impeded the conference rather than facilitated it. A lot of other technologies are better suited for this kind of event, such as a live streaming broadcast of real human beings. The interface simply isn't intuitive enough. There is too much of a "reality disconnect" when you're essentially listening to a conference telephone call while watching a cartoon avatar stand behind a podium without his or her lips moving. The real focus of most lectures was the PowerPoint slides, but you lose clarity, quality, and resolution when you convert slides into a texture and wrap it onto a 3D game object. It took a lot of complex camera manipulation ( CTL and ALT and arrow keys) to line up a good view, and even then, the quality was still degraded. I find SL's inventory system very hard to use, and while I thought the welcome kits were a good idea, it is not easy to open up and use, and not really practical for exchanging business documents; an e-mail with attached PDFs would be much easier to use.
The event wasn't without minor technical glitches. In the minutes before the event started, the MC asked someone to tell her real-life cubicle neighbor to move his avatar because he was blocking a control panel. Once we were underway several people lost voice connections or couldn't see the videos (including me). While the speakers were talking over voice, the text chat was full of technical Q&A.
Lastly, I come to what I wrote about yesterday... the vast emptiness of Second Life. I was impressed that around 30 people came to the event. I suspect they were mostly educators or government employees who are interested in using Second Life. What's missing, though, are the crowds of young people they are trying to educate or entertain. The Air Force has built this entire network of enormous islands as a playground in which to train and recruit, but in all the times I've visited there, I've only seen one other person one time. This is typical, which is why a lot of other organizations that tried out Second Life have been leaving.
I still believe virtual worlds are going to transform our society to the same degree that the Internet already has, but the transformation won't come from Second Life. Lately I've been thinking that we may breeze right past the stage where virtual worlds are something you look at on a tiny screen; the real revolution will come with augmented reality, when the virtual gets mixed into the real.
In closing, here are a few pictures from the event.
Introductory remarks by the MC
Here we are... the attentive audience
I think it's time for a break
You can glimpse some of the difficulties here, such as trying to read skewed PowerPoint slides. Note the chat window where technical Q&A is occurring.
0 comments:
Post a Comment