I’d like to endorse Jade Lily‘s suggestion that Linden Lab develop a CamPort facility in Second Life. The feature would give Second Life residents the ability to “remote camera” into an event without having the drag along a skinbag (avatar) that uses up client and server resources. It would mean events could scale beyond the present limitation of 40 or so avatars (skinbags) per island; a limitation that proscribes Second Life as an entertainment medium and as a presentation tool. I can’t think of another feature that would make as big a difference. Event capacity would significantly improve and virtual conferencing would be greatly enhanced.
Philip Rosedale, CEO of Second Life creator Linden Lab comments on the blog that “we can implement some things in this direction” so I expect it is on the development program.
Philip is profiled in Esquire this month; I liked his description of Second Life in the article: “It’s fundamentally out of control, like the real world”. This is not a reason for avoiding Second Life, it is an explanation of one of the attractive things about the place. The freedom to express yourself visually, socially and culturally almost without limitation. These guys should be paying me to do their marketing.
Camport would be an excellent feature.
You could even extend the range of the remote cam by simulcasting onto the internet, thus broadening the reach to non-residents. This would create a low involvement method of experiecing SL prior to registration, an excellent ‘pull’. Sure, you can watch clips of SL on Youtube but these are historic events/replays and don’t forget the variances between the demographic of SL (avg age 32) and that of Youtube (17-22).
Clearly would love to see this happen on a mass scale as well, but had to chime in and say for the time being, non-SL residents (or those who only have access to the web for whatever reason) have the option of experiencing SL via the eyes of DTV, at http://dtv.sheeplabs.com/ We are working on opening up DTV so that she can be invited to events in order to open up concerts and events to audiences exceeding the roughly 50 avatar limit on a simulator. Would love to hear any suggestions or thoughts you may have on how we could best do this or further improve the project in other ways.
Regards,
Christian