Museum Virtual Worlds

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.

www.flickr.com more images from Fabricated Realities

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.