LET'S DO THE REALITY WARP AGAIN!

Mixed reality:  hosting a Rocky Horror showing in Second Life replete with flying confetti, avatars doing the "Time Warp" dance, and all the classic wackiness.  Mixed reality plus:  hosting a Rocky Horror showing in Second Life, then broadcasting the SL event back into a theater, so a real world audience can participate along with the avatars.  Mixed reality, ultimate edition: hosting Rocky Horror as part of an academic project on blurring realities-- and despite threats to shut the whole thing down with lawsuits and visits by the cops.

Watch the video, then read on, for Kapital Metropolitan's narrative of how it all came together (and almost fell apart.)

"It was a project done as a part of the course Production of Architecture that I am teaching at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm," Kapital tells me.  (Kapital is a co-founder of the Port, an interactive art installation that launched in Second Life in 2005 with funding from the Swedish government.)  Working with a number of other European institutions, Kapital his students are "[t]rying to push the social and interactive side of Second Life, blurring the borders between on and offline, and creating oppurtunities for the students to involve in real projects, even though the starting point paradoxically comes from the virtual.

"So three of my students started to collaborate with Pirate Cinema Stockholm on a showing, which they did on the 1st of March here in Stockholm. The major obstacle was that the anti-piracy organization got to know about it. There was a big media coverage of the event beforehand. So we were all, me and my studnets and the student union, threatened with lawsuits and to be reported to the police, but we decided to go through with it anyway.

"So in real life there were some 150 people watching, dressed up, throwing confetti and the whole shabang. In Second Life there was another 40 avatars, watching the Stockholm audience watching the movie, five [video] beamers projected the Second Life audience back into the actual space in Stockholm, creating a loop of quite complex realities.

"One thing that we observed were that the real life audience behaved while the SL audience just ran around doing the interactive script of RHPS all at once and all the time. A true celebration and colorful expression of the wonderful and somtimes anarchistic lifestyle in Second Life. More info here." [scroll down the page]

Comments

[Alastair Chamerberlin]

owwww....that whole thing made my head hurt.