February 7, 2007

My First Second Life Dance Performance

On Sunday night, while watching the Super Bowl, I attended the premiere performance of Second Life Ballet's "Olmannen" in the Second Life virtual world. I wrote about this upcoming performance last week.

Well, I had to give myself a crash course in Second Life to attend this performance because I've never experimented with this virtual environment. But just about everything went wrong on the computer and software side for me, which I'll explain more about below.

But first, here is background about the Second Life Ballet performance so you can have an idea of what an avatar dance performance is like:

- The program guide for the performance of "Olmannen: An Original Ballet."

- A news piece from OspreyTherian, uploaded to YouTube, recaps the Sunday night performance. You can see the dancers in the background for a few seconds, which gives you a glimpse of what dancing is like in this virtual world:

- View performance pictures by Pathfinder Linden in a Flickr photo gallery. And here are three of them:

- And here's my only successful effort at capturing this performance. This is a snapshot I took of audience members about 20 minutes before the performance started. I'm the generic guy towards the top left with my head turned to the left. I would have sat closer to the front but all of these empty seats kept rejecting me?? My Second Life name is Dance Merlin. I really need appropriate attire for Second Life - I'm going to have to figure out how to get a new wardrobe:

Click for Larger Image

Jumping into Second Life

As you can see from the above, you only get a limited idea of what a dance performance is like in Second Life. My goal was to make a screen capture of the entire performance but I just couldn't pull this off because I had too much to learn about SL before the performance started.

But I'm going to attend another performance soon and try recording it again. There are performances every Sunday and Wednesday throughout February at 4:00 PM (PST). If you want to attend, you'll need these map coordinates for this location in Second Life.

First I tried installing Second Life software on my notebook PC but it didn't run properly. My guess is that I have to upgrade the driver for my graphics card. So then I installed the software on my desktop PC. That worked but I had to deactivate my security software to run the SL software.

Once I entered Second Life I had to figure out how to navigate - walk, rotate, fly and transport myself to different grid locations. I sort of figured out the basics but there's a lot to learn. I tried speaking with a few avatars I ran into but that ended up being a bit challenging.

Then I searched for a software program that would allow me to record the ballet performance. I found a program called Fraps that seemed to work well. So after testing it, I bought it for $37 so I could make screen captures of any length.

Once I visited the Second Life Ballet performance venue I recorded a walk-through so that I could upload a complete tour of this theater for you to watch. I did manage to record the walk-through, but I just realized that I recorded it at the wrong number of frames per second - that's easy to fix the next time I do this. But the end result is that the recording looks terrible and I decided not to upload it.

Then the performance started. I thought it was intriguing and I want to learn much more about how it was created and performed. I'd like to understand how avatars are controlled, scripted, animated and synchronized. Plus, I haven't seen other performances in SL to make comparisons. So I'm going to have to go back to an upcoming SL Ballet and also find other performances to watch - dance, theater and other types. If you have suggestions, please let me know.

I did try to record the entire performance but the Fraps software crashed on me and I have nothing to show you. Plus, the performance had a recorded, original music score that I didn't hear until the very end of the performance. I didn't realize that there's a button that you have to push on the volume control panel to hear an audio stream. It would have been much different if I had heard the music throughout the performance. All I heard was too many audience members taking snapshots of the performance or people were typing away at their keyboards making too much noise - just like a regular theater!

So I was really just overwhelmed because I didn't have enough time to figure everything out. Next time I'm sure everything will work smoothly and I'll have more to write about the Second Life Ballet and their performance.

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