Will Multi-Musician Online Performance Like This Ever Be Possible in Virtual Worlds?

Via Andrew Sullivan, here's a fun video for Monday afternoon, featuring multiple New York subway musicians in separate locations playing together via Skype video:

Of course it immediately makes me ask the NWN question: Can a performance like this ever be possible in a virtual world?

As it happens, I recently had a conversation around this with Philip Rosedale, as we were talking about the latency challenge virtual worlds face:

He wants his new High Fidelity virtual reality platform to operate at latency of 100 milliseconds or less, as I blogged last February, but then I asked him if that was low enough for two (or more) musicians in different parts of the world to play together in sync: He said probably not, for even the tiniest amount of latency would throw everything off. (I'm not even convinced the New York musicians in this video stayed in sync for an extended period of time, but let's assume so.)

There may be improvements to latency that'll make it possible in the near future, I imagine. Until then, it may be musicians like Emily may need to keep performing solo (or perform together vritually from the same real life space).

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Comments

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Ever played in a marching band? It's a real challenge to coordinate musicians who are only half a football field apart, much less half a world.

There are technical constraints that make it impossible to coordinate musicians in the way you suggest, barring some crazy breakthrough in quantum entanglement computing.

For the foreseeable future, we're stuck with "daisy chain" jamming, where each musician layers their work over the preceding and passes the stream to the next. It works pretty well, with the drawback that the first musician in the chain can't hear any of the others, the second can only hear the first, etc.

There are virtual bands in Second Life that do just that. Check out "Unresolved" if you ever get a chance, just to name one.

[Jose Squeegee]

This is so cool! I think Engrama has been doing some multi-musician online performances with another guy in Second Life.

[elsbeth writer]

Hmmm...I believe this has been happening for years in SL. I have attended many concerts inworld where the performers were in different locations in the real world. Different countries even! Of course you don't see the RL person, just their avatars together. But they are perfectly in sync because they share the same streaming program.

Or is what you're talking about something different?