Full disclosure time: I actually interviewed Sibley Verbeck (Sibley Hathor, in-world) a couple of months ago, but stupidly forgot to copy the transcript over to an external application before I logged off that day, so I lost it all! Fortunately, Sibley's a forgiving man. We met up at the Virtual Laguna Beach build, where I snapped some shots and he told me about what's currently going on with ESC. Thanks again, Sibley!
Thank you so much for agreeing to do this all over again!
No problem, thanks for your patience!
Oh, is this the MTV set?
Yeah - this is the prototype Virtual Laguna Beach we made last winter.
I'd only heard about this recently. Is the event over?
No, it's a whole virtual world launched by MTV called Virtual Laguna Beach. The beta version just launched last week. It's at vlb.mtv.com. We've been working all year with them and other companies designing and creating it.
I can tell; the detail's wonderful! I'll have to get extensive shots of this.
Cool. This island we did in just two weeks. The actual virtual world is much larger, and was build by us as well as other companies, such as Imaginary Forces, who is a Hollywood art studio.It's located on MTV's site?
It's promoted on MTV's site, yes. You can register there to download the client, go in world, etc. It's a very different type of place than Second Life, really -- it's for a younger audience -- more like the teen grid, and is more focused around living virtually in that type of show rather than in constructing a user generated world from scratch. Frankly, as such, it's WAY easier to use than Second Life.
What sort of tutorials or help do people get, if they're not familiar with SL?
Well, it's not at all based on Second Life, so it's completely separate. The technology is built by Makena, who also runs There.com. It has a very straightforward interface, and simple initial experience so people figure out how to move, chat, and interact with the world. It's all very straightforward so that users take a quick path of coming in and starting to interact with each other, with content from the show and related events, etc., instead of spending as much time customizing themselves and their environments as they do in SL. I think there are a lot of useful lessons from that project on how to make SL more friendly to new users.
That's pretty cool; whose initial idea was it?
MTV's. They're pretty interested in how to make their media more interactive, so this is one experimental project they're doing.
Has it been successful so far?
Definitely. It's still early, of course, but there are users streaming in all the time. Today they're doing what is a first as far as I know - they're showing tomorrow night's Laguna Beach episode in-world 24 hours before it goes on TV. And then having an event in the virtual world that mirrors what the people on the show are doing, which is a Winter Formal. So you can see how the virtual world is built around that particular show.
Jeez. I really hope it's not limited to PC users.
Unfortunately because it's using the technology from There.com, it is indeed Windows only. (Which I'm typing on a Mac right now).
Argh ... well, I'm expecting my new 24" iMac any day now, and I've got a copy of Parallels Desktop, so that won't be a hindrance.
Nice. Yeah, most of the Sheep are running on Intel Macs these days.
The Sheep ... that always gets me! How is everyone? Happily toiling along?
Yeah! Most of the time it feels like we're playing, but of course it's also toil I suppose.
We'll keep it a secret.
Heheh, thanks.
Is the team still below 20?
No, we're at 25 at this point.
Ah, growth is good!
And looking for a full time machinimist if you know anyone who would do well at that.
Have you contacted Moo Money?
No, haven't yet. I've heard of her but I don't think we've met at all.
I'd recommend her and Robbie Dingo
Cool, thanks!
I suppose we ought to get on to the typical questions.
Sure -- remind me what those are!
Haha ... right! Um ... I was going to ask what the ratio of ESC looking for projects/Projects coming to ESC is.
Well, we have yet to start looking. We keep meaning to do that, and are trying to get to that point. But for now, still trying to keep up with the incoming work.
That's not bad at all! Better to have a surfeit than be starving.
Absolutely. Who knows what the future will be like, but for now our stress comes from getting all the work done, for sure. Which is not to say that it isn't a lengthy process some times to get a client. Just that they're looking us up at the beginning of the process and expressing interest.
Is there usually a lot of hand-holding with a client? Sort of "you can't do this, but you can do this"?
Yes, typically there is. You know SL -- it's so open ended, and yet there are a lot of limitations. Plus we have to filter ideas for what will make sense technically and culturally in SL. We certainly don't want any of our client projects to bomb in SL (although some are just for their internal use). But yes, sometimes we get clients coming to us who know exactly what they want to do.
And sometimes those are great ideas, and sometimes not. Other times people come to us and just say "we think we should be using Second LIfe, but aren't sure how"
That's kind of maddening.
Actually for us it's fun -- those are times when we can try to understand their company and then be creative. Text100 is a technology PR firm that is using SL partly to show their customers now PR techniques but also for internal meetings. We also have other organizations that are using SL for training, but those aren't public yet.
I listened to a recent podcast with two folks interviewing you at some tech function ... I don't recall now what it was. John Swords was involved.
Must have been Secondcast from the Metverse Roadmap.
That's it! That was a great interview.
Thanks! That was back in May - seems so long ago now already!
Are there any technologies not yet in place that you wish LL would implement that would make your work easier?
Oh heavens, lots!
Bring it on, Sibley!
Well, one thing is that major television companies who want to do projects like MTV's won't use SL until there is video streaming that includes DRM. That might be included if they got the HTML on a Prim working, which I know has turned out to be a real pain. Of course we'd love to have the rest of the Web browser functionality in SL -- that will make SL all the more interactive -- not just from bringing Web content in, but more from the point of view of driving experiences off of data that you store on a Web server.
Definitely.
And then of course many other things that SL needs -- search, and many other ways to find people and activities that interest you. ESC may well work on some of those problems. And VOIP -- SL needs VOIP. Not everyone will want to use it, and that's totally fine. But for business uses, we certainly need it. (ESC for example would have way more of our meetings in SL if there was good VOIP) And then other less sexy things. Like the ability for certain parts of SL to not update when a new update comes out, and to stay up during updates.
Oh MAN, I'd love that.
Because we have customers who, say, have one chance to impress their CEO about their SL project, and then the grid might be down. Of course there will always be outages, but reducing those, and also making some areas not update until the whole grid has tested a release for a couple weeks -- that would help keep some areas stable enough to work for RW businesses. And so on... We could go on all day, but those seem like the top of the list. And of course it's worth acknowledging that LL is working very hard and making a lot of progress.
So, are you saying that currently, without DRM in it, streaming video is appropriable?
Absolutely. Or more to the point, it's easy to figure out the URL of the Quicktime stream, and then post that URL on the Web, so anyone can watch it just out on the Web. Which isn't necessarily what media companies want if they're building a viewing experience in SL.
Sure.
Of course it's the case that with the right software, you can capture any video that is shown on your monitor; most of that is not legal but still happens of course. But media companies have many legal obligations to the content creators or other parties -- they have to be very cautious in this area, not just because they want to. Unfortunately there isn't real DRM for Quicktime available.
Yeah, that's a typicality not often covered by the opponents of DRM.
And that's the only video streaming that exists in SL. Right. I'm not saying whether it's good or not -- it's just a current fact of the industry. Although LL is picking up steam as they grow. But as they said at SLCC, they're working mostly on making things work more scalably and be architected for the future rather than adding new features right now.
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