LIVE Webcast of the Transit of Venus Streamed Into Second Life
The Exploratorium’s team of Second Life staff and volunteers put on another mixed-reality webcast viewing event in SL on June 5th, 2012, extending the museum and online event of the Exploratorium’s live webcast of the 2012 Transit of Venus into the virtual world. Avatar-scientist Patio Plasma hosted the in-world event which featured the 6.5 hr long live webcast of telescopic images of the sun and the rare planetary transit. Volunteers in SL helped avatars see the stream. For this event, we tried a different method of putting the stream into SL–using the HTML on a prim feature of the SL viewer. This method proved to be workable, though not as easy to use for SL residents as the traditional approach of replacing a prim texture with a Quicktime stream. With each event, we learn more about the best ways to use the multimedia features of SL and how to engage avatars with live webcasts.
