Click here at 4pm Pacific if you're a fan of Baby Metal, because it will teleport you to the stage at Wolf Den, where a group of SLers have created a roleplay tribute band to the epic Japanese supergroup, a face-punching mash-up of bravura speed and death metal and insanely adorable kawaii singers. (Yes, the group you might have saw on Colbert's show, the one that made your jaw drop and gasp, "W.T.F.") The avatar-based cover version is the brainchild of Grey Snow, who wanted to translate the group's energy and dazzling live shows into an experience for a metaverse audience:
"I wanted to see if it is even possible to do something like this in Second Life," Grey tells me. "A show with dance animations, movements, and light show in sync to the music, as close as possible to the original. It turned out it is quite some effort -- but it is possible to some degree! Knowing this, I wanted to do it, wanted to bring the power of the Fox God to Second Life."
He performed a trial version for some fellow Baby Metal fans in SL, and soon enough, others had volunteered to help put on the live show, which involves three avatars who play the singers Su-metal, Yuimetal, and Moametal, as well as Baby's four musicians. They all coordinate together online from various parts of the world for the live show, which streams in the original band's music, which takes an incredible amount of coordination:
"There is always a delay from streaming source to the players of the listeners," Grey says, "which depends on encoder settings, number of stream relays, behavior of the media player, etc. It could be several seconds up to a minute or more. To make sure we all hear the music at the same time as the audience, we use a streaming service without relay servers, and we all listen to the stream -- not to the source. Each of us knows which instruments they play and how it sounds. Music starts playing, we start our corresponding animations. If needed, communication between us happens in the background in instant messages or voice chat. There is still some delay between us that depends on distance and network infrastructure and what not, but in most cases it is small enough to be ignored, or at least it does not disturb too much to destroy the impression of a synced choreography. Residents of Second Life are used to a bit of lag."
And for a little lag, you get all that killer kawaii shredding. For future news and other shows, the fan group's Facebook page is here, Flickr page (where the cover album-worthy SL pic above comes from) is here.
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