Planning to Mix Realities
A new event involving virtual worlds currently being planned at the Exploratorium is Fabricated Realities. This will be a mixed-reality event that takes place at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and on Exploratorium Island in Second Life. The Exploratorium’s Cinema Arts Program will present a screening of Douglas Gayeton’s machinima documentary, Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey at 2pm PST on January 24, 2009. Doug, who will be part of the public program at the museum, will also appear in SL via live webcast. The idea is to bring the film, speaker, and audience together from the two spaces. We hope the interaction will work and are planning to include a projection screen in the physical theater that will show the audience in the amphitheater in SL. We’ll encode and stream the movie into SL in real time so that the audience there will see the same thing as the audience at the museum, with just a slight delay. We’ll plan to allow the SL audience to ask questions of the filmmaker and to have live video of his reponse streamed back into SL. The technical setup to manage the video streams and two-way communication between the real and the virtual is a little dicey (more on that in a follow-up post), but we’ll be leveraging our experience with routing audio/video signal for presentation and live video encoding/streaming.
