Attend all of Metaverse U virtually for free!
I am very happy to announce that live video from every session at our conference will be streamed into Second Life for free. There are many members of our community who for whatever reason cannot make it to Stanford on February 16th and 17th. We wanted to give them the chance to take part in Metaverse U. After the hump I will explain some of our thinking behind this and let you know where to go to attend.
One lesson learned from our recent metaverse meetups was a real strong interest in taking advantage of the opportunities technology gives us for virtual attendance at events. With the internet we have seen a real comprehensive decentralization and multiuser virtual environments have pushed the boundaries of this further.
Another insight was there certainly are good and bad ways to do this. For the inworld part of the meetups we enlisted the help of the people behind one of my favorite places in Second Life. The International Space Flight Museum challenges the notion of what a museum can be in 2008 so it seems appropriate that they be a part of challenging what a conference can be. The Space Flight museum is a part of SciLands, a consortium of universities, government agencies, museums, non-profit scientific organizations and individuals interested in promoting and participating in the use of virtual worlds for scientific and technical purposes. What better place to host a conference such as ours?
Over a four sim corner the SciLands people have built the Skyditorium (SLURL). Starting at 9 am PST/SLT on February 16th 2008 you can go here to attend Metaverse U for free. To further underscore that this is anything but traditional broadcast we will have people on the ground to field questions back to us at the conference including you in the conversation.
Being on the bleeding edge of technology attendance through Second Life is likely to be a bumpy ride. In our attempts to make the streaming as solid as possible we are working with a local startup called Veodia who specializes in these matters. We feel that we have done what we can to make the road a little smoother but still would not recommend this for the faint at heart :)
This whole streaming idea came from attending conferences that took place in expensive hotels in far away places and often thinking that the time had come to challenge this way of doing things. I wanted Metaverse U to be the most radically transparent and inclusive conference ever so spending a good chunk of our sponsor money on sharing made perfect sense. The truth is also that impact is what we hold as the best metric of our success. We want the videos to live out there to help inform our conversations ranging from spontaneous discussions to academic papers.
To this end I am happy to report that the second part of this announcement is that after the conference all the videos will be made freely available on the web. I am still looking into where to put them and am open to suggestions. I have put on workshops here at Stanford with 25 attendees. Videos from these were later watched thousands of times on the web. We are talking 90 minutes clips of conversation hardly the format that normally rocks the house on YouTube. The fact is that freely sharing can make both the event itself and its afterlife so much bigger, so if you, like us, are looking for impact the choice is rather simple.
We hope you will join us for Metaverse U in your reality of choice :)
- Henrik Bennetsen's blog
- Login to post comments
Speakers
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Comments
Conference on SL
Congratz for making this possible! I am sure in Europe for instance quite some people would like to attend the meetings, but cannot make it that easily to Stanford.
So using Second Life and archiving the video are great ideas to help us gain access to the conference!
Roland Legrand, Belgium
Well done!
Thanks for making it available. I think that is very cool. I live in New Zealand and really look forward to attending the conference in SL! Regards, Revd Mark Brown http://brownblog.info/
Sharing the URL
I fail to understand why my comment, with a simple list of best practices and tips for holding meetings, was cut here.
So let me raise again the most important issue: the URL for the stream must be published, and allowed to be copied.
This is the single most important feature of any venue that will be packed and unapproachable for many people. They simply must be able to hold spillover events in their own venues and see the video as well.
If you are sharing the content of the conference, there is no reason not to do this.
Prokofy Neva
Att. Euros and Kiwis :)
Mark and Roland,
so cool to see that you will join us. It will take some determination and good strong coffee to face the time differences that you are up against if you do it live, so good luck with that.
Henrik (euro transplant)
Location location location
Hi Prokofy,
I apologize for your comment somehow getting lost in the ether. I have not deleted it and only found your last comment in the queue. Please repost if you get the chance.
Reg. your question: Why do we ask people to come to the Skyditorium rather than make the URL public? When I talked to Veodia about streaming they asked me for the number of streams I needed. Frankly I had no idea how many people would be interested and told them this, but their business model (read: The price we pay) required that I give them a number so I settled on 300.
During the meetups the ISM folks really did a great job so I went to them and told them about my thoughts and 300 the number. They kindly suggested the Skyditorium since host about 200+ people. I also really like the idea of having people in one place where we then can put someone on the (virtual) ground to take questions from SL.
We get a RTSP link from Veodia and when the number of viewers (people in SL takes up one per avatar/client watching) at any given time 300 hits this there is a hard stop. My fear is that if we give the stream away people might show up at the Skyditorium to find that they can't see the stream. Instead we can set the limits to the 4 sims to correspond with our streaming limit.
I would gladly take some input on this from anyone reading here:
Is 300 the right number? If I had a strong reason to believe it was I would be willing to throw resources towards towards convincing Veodia to raise the number. The thing is that such resources ($) would be wasted if we never hit the 300 so I would need some compelling reason :)
Is there a way for someone out there to take a RTSP link and recast it? If so would anyone have the capacity to do this?
This is really an experiment on every level so any and all input from the hive out there would be much appreciated.
Beyond the limits of SL
Hi,
You raise very relevant points about the limits of participation in SL. You might like to look at how we are approaching it on the OneClimate islands. We broadcast live streams from the UN Climate Conference in Bali, Indonesia for 12 days in December. There's a video report here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg4IJcX4sI0
In order to get beyond the 50-avatar limits per sim, we broadcast live video from SL into UStream, which meant anyone on the web could watch. There was a live chat box for everyone to put their questions via OneClimate to the live panel in Bali and get responses. You can see a recording of what it looked like here: http://www.oneclimate.net/virtualbali
We'd be happy to share our experience of the technology used and the issues raised, and to hear of anyone involved in the climate issue who would like to link to what we are working on.
Distance management and sharing!
Hi Henrik,
Another european thanks for making this exclusive moment available to us too!
Myriam from Paris, France
limits of participation
is it possible to provide subtitling or signing avatars during the conferences?
Subtitling
Lucas raises an interesting point. As anyone done "subtitling" for meetings such as this? I can imagine a fast typist keeping up with the gist of a presentation, but if it's sent out via chat, it wouuld get mixed up with all the other chatter going on, wouldn't it? I don't think you'll get 200 some-odd avatars to refrain from using chat.
Transcribing
Lucas and Ilene,
I agree that it would be fantastic with someone transcribing this live. We don't have any specific plans to have someone do this. With two full days of conference it would be a substantial job. Should someone by up for this then I will offer them free access to the two full days of conference if they could bring their own laptop to do this from. If you are interested then please write me directly at hbeATstanfordDOTedu
Thanks from Europe
yes thanks for the chance to attend this virtually. It could be an option for another time to get people to register for the event (even if its free) to get a better feel for numbers..
And to blur the lines during the actual event I would like to see more companies trying to host a couple of short session speakers via the virtual world (and broadcast the other way - into the real world auditorium).. just a thought.
Anyway, big thumbs up!
RVSP & inworld presentations
Hey Groove,
I agree that it would be great with a way to let other people know who was coming. I have setup a Facebook event that everyone can RSVP to: http://stanford.facebook.com/event.php?eid=6528928604 Ideally we would have something more visible though, so your point is well taken.
As for the inworld part of the presentation. From the event at Stanford Jon Brouchoud will be demoing Wikitecture from using Second Life and collaborating with a distributed team, so there will be an inworldish presentation. They will do that from their own space, so you are probably still better of staying at the Skyditorium at watching the video.
I do basically agree that lack of inworld elements to virtual worlds conferences is a problem. You could say that as a community we should eat our own dogfood. In truth these things are still a bit of a gamble becuase of the rough state of current technology. I can tell you that we are painfully aware of the potential for the tech to cause problems and sabotage the inworld part of Metaverse U. We have taken every precaution we could so I hope we are good, but will admit to butterflies in my stomach over this :)
Cake and eating it too
The opportunity to attend virtually, allows me to not only not miss the conference, but add a very interesting wrinkle in my documentary film "Virtually Real" while being on vacation with my family. How great that I'll be able to compare and contrast interviews with real life people conducted in wacky places like a coffee shop in Milwaukee, WI, or a Peet's at SFO, with attending a conference through SL while sitting by a pool!
Can't wait for either!
Uuuhmm cake
My Homer Simpson comment for the day :)
African in the House
Looking forward to attend the conference a bit later today! Wishing the organisers well. And THANK YOU!
Hosting
I am just talking with people at the location here about the video footage. What I wanted to propose is to use http://blip.tv for hosting the final videos. Reasons:
- multiple formats possible, even HD
- length or size seem not to matter
- automatically converts Quicktime to Flash
- provides some nice players and embed options
- allows to download the video
- creates RSS feeds with iTunes support automatically
The important part usually is to be able to upload Quicktime videos and be able to download them again like that so people can stream it in Second Life. Also important for iPods.
My suggestion :)
metaverse conference
Where will video be available after the conference. will audio be available on podcasts from Stanford u or itunes, if not then where. thanks.
URL for archive?
hi - is there an archived URL of the proceedings anywhere?