Thursday, December 13, 2007

Second Life Not Second Best to Being Live

Second Life is a second skin for companies and individuals to represent themselves online, but it's a strange technology to use to present before the U.N. But that's exactly what Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts did.

Markey was unable to attend a U.N. meeting in Bali about climate change, so instead he created a Second Life avatar and had his other self give his speech remotely. Videoconferencing has been a reliable alternative to in-person meetings, but I'm guessing he couldn't get it to work in time for the meeting.

Second Life affords more flexibility than the constraints of the real world, but I doubt I'd be enthralled to listen to a speech given by a virtual representation of a member of congress, or anyone else for that matter. SL may be great for marketing because (like animation over film) the players aren't limited by things like location or gravity.

While the avatars of SL may be realistic by today's technology standards, I can't take seriously the words of someone spoken through a cartoony image. Don't expect SL to take the place of video conferencing anytime soon unless their is the need for animated embellishment.

Via Mashable.

By John Gartner at 05:26 AM | Comments (1)

(1) Thoughts on Second Life Not Second Best to Being Live

Video conferencing is indeed good for simple one-to-group meetings, so you make a good point, but what happened in Virtual Bali achieved far more than this. It would not have been possible - neither easy nor affordable - for all those avatars/people in the audience who each came from a different part of the world to be linked in via dozens of video conference suites, unless they all belonged to some rich insitution like the World Bank... But regular citizens? How would they have checked in from their own homes?

Comments by Anuradha Vittachi : Thursday, December 13, 2007 at 07:41 AM

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