Tateru's Monday Reality Mix

Tateru Nino's weekly take on mixed reality...

Broadway comes to Second Life! For more than two decades, resident Persephone Gallindo has been an Equity Stage Manager, both on and off Broadway. Her family environment was also steeped in aspects of the theater. Gallindo is a woman who loves the theater, and has a passion for it-- and a passion for Second Life. Can Gallindo bring tasty theater to Second Life?

Also, we take a wander around Online Uru's island, a microprocessor manufacturer, our mixed reality metrics, and briefly note a grassroots campaign for Senator Barack Obama, all after the fold.

Mixed Reality Theater

Persephone Gallindo, avid theater-goer, Equity Stage Manager, cultural aficionado and all-around witty and charming speaker has a dream.

Gallindo seeks to bring good, solid theater into Second Life. She has already been involved in an in-world production of Romeo and Juliet, and understands the myriad organizational and technical barriers, and knows that it's not just a matter of grabbing what works in the physical world and expecting it to work as well here. "Well, we're defining-- re-defining-- virtual performance," she says, "It's inventing itself as we speak."

Gallindo's vision starts with Vaudeville. Probably when many people hear the word they think of dreadfully embarrassing stage acts, bowler hats, floppy shoes and trousers full of custard.  (Vaudeville gained an unwarranted reputation for mediocrity as the cinema industry drew away the majority of its leading lights and talents with promises of better pay and conditions-- not all of which were fulfilled.)

Vaudeville was, at its heart, a calculated rotating progression of short acts, from jugglers and comedians, to singers and mathematicians. Audiences were a varied bunch, but shorter acts were logistically simpler and more economical to stage, and well, if you didn't like a particular act, something else would be along fairly soon.

Gallindo believes that the shorter Vaudvillian performances will work better at this stage, in a virtual world context, be simpler to develop, less intensive to coordinate, and less demanding of the audience's time. You know, all the reasons Vaudeville became the staple of American entertainment for many years.

We chatted on the stage of Gallindo's model theater, under construction. Based heavily on 19^th century theaters, the theater would seat up to 800, if any place in Second Life could handle that load. Gallindo is building with an eye to the future, in any case. There have been discussions with a possible major corporate sponsor, which could lead to much higher capacity venues than are currently available, if all goes well.

"There are a lot of people who Don't Get the theater," Gallindo observed, "It's not something they've been exposed to, what with competition from all the other media. But if the 'synergy' (thank you Anna Wintour) is our goal then this is the perfect medium to bring the past up to date and show them what they've been missing. Not just in imitation of live performance."

Even in the partially built theater, laid out on a builders' grid, piecemeal like a cross between Dali and Escher, there's a special feeling to the place that suggests at any moment that it might come alive with Art.

Mixed Reality Microelectronics

"AMD Dev Central Island". What is it with the mouthful names? Surely we don't have to name every island like a prescription medicine-– something memorable but abstract would be fine, at least if you make at least one of your land parcels searchable (hint-– much better than relying on people searching the map for the sim name.)

When you arrive, you could be forgiven for thinking that you teleported to Cisco's islands by mistake. The buildings feel very similar (mind you, they're both indistinguishably like the local HP campus in my city), modernist spaces that look to be mostly oriented around watching videos or small seminars.

Mixed Reality Virtual Reality

Uru island's certainly an enticing place (despite the awkward Myst Online Uru name). Mind you, when I arrived there, a script handed me a notecard recommending settings that would cause my PC to melt down. That aside, my more modest configuration allowed me a very pleasant wander through the place, where at every turn there's some thing or other that you suddenly think would look perfect from a particular angle, and I began to wander all over looking at things from different sides and different angles.

The place as a whole fits together into a synthesis that feels made from whole cloth. An eclectic mix of the familiar and unfamiliar, it all seems to make its own kind of sense. Uru island makes sense the way your dreams make sense. While you're inside of it, everything is what it is supposed to be. Well, right up until you pass into a hidden nook, among the gorgeous, slightly foreign architecture, and bump up against the advertising.

Mixed Reality Traffic

The L-Word's traffic figure has dropped down two weeks' running. Here's New Citizens Incorporated, a native site which rated more than twice as highly.

Each week we build an aggregate mixed-reality metric from the traffic figures of several notable sites, and match it to figures for a selection of "native" content (NCI, The Shelter, YadNI's Junkyard, the Ivory Tower of Primitives).

Let's revisit those sites and find out how they're doing compared to last week.

• The L word: 15,514 (down 3,376)
• Nissan: 3,832 (down 488)
• IBM: 2,554 (up 757)
• Adidas: 1,522 (down 31)
• AOL Pointe: 1,504 (down 104)
• Usability Island: 1,484 (up 179)
• Pontiac: 1,069 (down 652)
• Cisco: 905 (up 706)
• Circuit City: 839 (down 964)
• Thomson training: 825 (down 161)
• Reebok: 726 (down 118)
• Sears: 611(down 261)
• Magnatune: 448 (up 14)
• Sony BMG: 294 (down 108)

Tateru's Overall Mixed Reality Index: 2,294 (down 323)
Tateru's Native Reality Index: 25,764 (down 3,424)

Fairly steady falls for the most part, though Cisco took a huge jump. Proportionally the falls in the two indices are about the same, so the traffic fall seems to be more of a matter of Second Life variation, rather than the fall or rise in popularity of native versus mixed-reality content.

Mixed Reality Politics

Along side the campaign efforts of John Edwards in Second Life, a grass-roots Second Life group has formed around the candidacy of charismatic Democrat Barack Obama.  Founded by Cubsfan Pugilist, the "Obama for President" group doesn't have a site in-world yet, but are working on organizing one. There are rumors around the grid that at least one more candidate for the 2008 USA elections will be appearing in Second Life.

Now, I don't know the first thing about American Politics and parties, but I'll bone up a bit and when the various groups get their campaign offices and virtual campaigns together, we'll see if we can get around and talk to them all about their efforts, and look into the differences in their approaches.

Got a mixed reality tip for Tateru?  E-mail her at [email protected].

Comments

[TJ Ay]

Smile, pretty funny.
Our little event place (and I mean little) had more vistor than SONY, laugh.
By my own statistics (don't believe an stats you have not changed yourself) we are getting aroudn 50 user per day, more on the weekend.

TJ Ay in Ebersberg.

[Carl Metropolitan]

To be fair to L Word, they are not just one location. Showtime and ESC operate a whole string of L Word Islands, including several custom orientation islands, and a number of events islands. (In fact, the classes that NCI teaches for them have recently moved to L Word1 island from the original L Word island.)

I think one or two of the other Mixed Reality sites you listed may also span multiple sims, too. Of course some of your Native Reality site also have multiple locations (NCI & Shelter), but it still seems like a bit apples and oranges. Part of the problem is that SL's traffic measurement is so opaque, that its really hard to aggregate traffic across multiple locations and/or sims. At NCI we've run up the problem of potential RL advertisers looking at SL traffic numbers and asking us what they mean. We've had to tell them we don't really know, that LL keeps those forumla's secret. Not too confidence inspiring...

[Tateru Nino]

Well, the formulas aren't so much secret as they are difficult to map back to real world activity.

Plus, of course, yes, a single operation may have many sites and locations. I've tried to come up with metrics that are somewhat mitigating for that, but I've been given some ideas about some alternative methods for working out some fairer numbers, and I'll experiment a little with those.

I'm not sure that people would be so keen on me installing my own traffic counters all over the darn place to get my own statistics.

[Penisa]

strict space for buddy. trust to get more from your side :)