Suzanne Vega

Minutes after getting home last night and stepping into my alternate reality (aka Second Life) I got a message from a friend — musician Suzanne Vega was giving a live concert inside of Second Life. She send me a teleport request and — whoosh — I was there. Suzanne’s avatar looked just like her:

She sat on stage and her voice was streamed in real time:

She was quite aware of her Second Life presence, and she watched and reacted to the crowd. Here’s how things looked from her vantage point:

And from mine:

Finally, here’s a view from above. Not all of the more distant avatars are visible — there was apparently some kind of load management taking place in the background.

From her comments it was clear that she was new to Second Life, but she sounded genuinely intrigued by the possibilities, especially when someone asked her if she would like to be interviewed by an in-world journalist. She gave a somewhat non-commital yet enthusiastic response.

This was a fun event, and it was neat to more or less “be there” without having to buy tickets, wait in line, and so forth. Was it as compelling or as intense as a real world concert? Probably not, but it was certainly low-friction to get there and it was “fun enough.”

Oh yeah, and one more thing — the t-shirts were free.

So, dear readers, you may wonder why I am posting all of these screen shots, and why I am so taken with Second Life. I’ve been making some notes on the subject and I’ll create a separate post sometime in the next week or two. These screen shots are interesting, but they don’t convey the rich, dynamic, person-to-person interaction that takes place inside. This is a situation where you really need to get in, explore, and learn on your own to really see and experience why this is so cool and why I think that its “the future” (insert woo-woo noises here).

More later!