Proof of concept - Second Life mixed reality events

We have finished the project on our Shiva region. Some promo videos are being prepared, but briefly, it was a success and we've earned a nice proof of concept for Second Life live conferencing. Now that the whole project ended with a success I'm more free to talk about it. Our job was to prepare a mixed reality event with over 20 participants IRL and some 6 staff members online. We prepared a themed full region, custom built, with significant branding elements and attention to details. We worked hard on appliances fit for the client's individual presentation needs including custom live video streams controlled via HUDs, live http communication and custom 3D modeling. One of the aspects of the project was registration and custom design of 20+ avatars. We also provided the real life on-location support and live online aid during the event itself..

We learned about a couple of things to mind when dealing with such RL/SL projects...
Don't even think about trying to run some good 20 clients on laptops in one space connected via wifi as we did. It's a nightmare. We finally employed three AP's and the machines ceased to log off in two minutes intervals and somehow seemed to be able to stay inworld. Voice and streaming video was another story though. We were wise enough to bring our own infrastructure hardware along with our machines so we have set up an improvised LAN to lend the streaming servers some solid ground. A thing to remember. It's not just the client. It's the quicktime plugin too. The more machines you use the better the chance that quicktime will install in a weird way and the media content won't stream. Then you can try your luck determining whether it's a network problem, trouble with the streaming server, or the client machine itself.

Running voice for 20 clients in a single room is a dangerous enterprise too, I must admit. I won't go deeper into explaining the difficulties we went through, but I was lucky enough to bring Frodo from Prozeta Broadcasters with me, apart from the fun from watching him declass the congress hotel IT staff, he was one of the key elements of the purely magic experience when we got it all up and working. Admittedly after some five hours of sweat and blood :)

We have a decent use case scenario to show off, everybody is happy, and the event itself was fun and fresh experience. Now, in the atmosphere of satisfaction, we're thinking about what to do about the space now, when the event is over. There's a couple of paths we're considering right now. We're thinking about making some decent roleplay estate. Something to really show our abilities in. This is coming no matter what, but the recent development brought my attention back to serious custom applications of the virtual environment. I'm considering some more corporate projects and actually the newcomer friendly Shiva could be a good base for something like this. Anyway, there's a lot of fun coming before the end of the year.

In Prefabrica we're about to produce some new texture packs soon along with a little surprise to come... Also I'm considering a sub-brand of non full perm gadgets as we got some of the prefabs into a state where they're attractive not just to the content creators... And yeah, we're still running DL and HB, and yes, we're preparing some releases there too :) I'm going to blog a bit more about the content market but I'm still kind of summing up my conclusions from the recent meetings I've had and articles I've read. I'm free to play again, and it's going to be a pleasure :)