Creating objects and experiences that tell the multifaceted story of the number Pi is nothing less than serious fun. Now in it’s third year being celebrated by the Exploratorium community in Second Life, and in it’s twenty first year being commemorated world-wide, Pi Day is a unique opportunity to be amazed by the relevance of the ever repeating number yielded by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter. Exploratorium staff and SL community members have created unique exhibits that let avatars experience, learn about, and contemplate Pi. Exhibits on display all month with a special event on Pi Day 3/14/2009 from 1:00 - 3:00 PM PDT on Exploratorium Island and at Sploland.
Douglas Gayeton said to crowds both corporeal and digital that Fabricated Realities, the mixed-reality screening of his film, Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey, was “surreal.” Not just because the simultaneous screening occurred at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and on Exploratorium Island in SL, but also because SL creator Phillip Rosedale was in the (real) audience. 40 people at the Exploratorium watched the film as well as projected views showing the same number of avatars, gathered in an amphitheater in SL for the screening and opportunity to dialogue with the filmmaker. The audience in SL enjoyed seeing the live scenes from their world streamed to the theater in real life, then back again into avatar space. After the screeniing, Doug spoke about his own odyssey making the film, collaborating with a SL resident who he’s never met IRL (in real life), and shared his insight about the continually changing virtual world medium.
Our upcoming “mixed reality” video screening event, Fabricated Realities, which will occur on January 24th at our museum in San Francisco and on Exploratorium Island in Second Life, poses some unique technical challenges. Like other public programs for which we’ve created a virtual counterpart, we’re taking advantage of things we’ve learned before and techniques and processes we’ve developed. We’ve scaled back part of the initial plan for what videos signals will be digitally encoded for streaming into SL, but will keep those elements in mind for future cinema arts related programs.
In this event, we’ll combine two audiences, one real, one virtual, to hopefully create an integrated experience where a filmmaker can interact with people in front of him and avatars projected alongside. Both audiences will view the artist’s documentary shown on a screen in front of them at almost nearly the same time. Only a slight delay of a few seconds occurs when we encode video and stream it into the virtual world. Wayne Grim, one of my colleague’s at the Exploratorium, created a theater configuration diagram and an audio/video/networking signal-path diagram that shows how we’re setting up those signals in the McBean Theater at the Exploratorium.
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.
Using digital design tools to develop ideas for and to prototype real world museum exhibits is an important aspect of contemporary exhibit design. The Tech museum of innovation in San Jose, California is experimenting with a twist on this by inviting people outside of their exhibit design staff to create exhibits virtually in SL that will be created IRL and exhibited at The Tech.
In The Tech Virtual Museum Workshop, they opened up a design competition and gave in-world classes and workshops to help guide exhibit developers in using SL to realize their ideas. They selected seven winning designs and fabricated the exhibits which have been installed as a first exhibit in The Tech Virtual Test Zone Gallery at the museum in San Jose. Peter Friess, President of the institution, welcomed a group of San Francisco Bay Area museum and education professionals to the opening of the new exhibit at the Tech on June 4, 2008, along with Philip Rosedale, Founder and Chairman of the Board of Linden Lab — creators of Second Life and the Second Life Grid. Friess stated that The Tech was committed to using experimental methods such as prototyping and developing exhibits in SL as a way to develop new museum exhibits and that sharing information and practices about the approach with other museums and interactive developers was an important part of the museum’s process.
This past year, we’ve been seeing more and more physical devices connected to objects and avatars in SL, adding further complexity to mixed reality and augmented reality environments for exhibits and installations.
Artists have often been at the forefront of interfacing the real and the virtual and in exploring the grey zones where these worlds meet. New media arist and sculptor Joe Delappe re-enacted Ghandi’s historic Salt March of 1930, a protest against the British tax on salt at the time. At a gallery in New York and in Second Life this past March and April, Joe walked 240 miles on a treadmill he connected to SL to control his avatar MGandhi Chakrabarti’s virtual world steps, recreating the march. As much a performance as an installation, his work demonstrates the interesting time displacement effects and physical connections that are possible when RL elements are combined with telepresence and virtual environments. We often think of things in a virtual sense as being instantenous, so it’s somewhat jarring to put something like the slower speed of a real person walking next to flying avatars. With a nod to the Slow Food and Slow Art movements, real/virtual connections like this might allow us to savor our virtual interactions a bit more.
