digital lyceum

This is the first in a series of posts surveying the people and projects involved in producing lecture-style mixed reality events. If you are involved in this work, we’d love to hear from you! Please visit our contact page for more information or leave a comment below.Over at the NMC Campus Observer blog, Alan Levine(aka, CDB Barkley) has posted a number of useful tidbits on the technical aspects of producing lecture-style events across virtual and physical spaces. In this post, I’ll point to a couple of these examples at this intersection of mixed-reality event production.Last month, Alan blogged about his experience streaming a video ofLarry Johnson’s talk in the Second Life during a Unesco conference in Barcelona. He wrote

“How truly flat-worldish it was to watch my NMC colleague, who lives in Texas, present in Spain, as I viewed it from a hotel room in Sydney, Australia. I missed out the last bits of the discussion, which I understood had a mixed reaction from the Barcelona audience on the potential of SL for education.” 

Earlier this year, Alan wrote about another mixed-reality event with Sarah Robbins, of Ball State University, presenting at the SLCC 07 conference.

“Sadly, with hotel internet connectivity issues plaguing the conference, the live audio stream into Second Life did not make it. We understood that as pluck in world residents that we have, people gathered in NMC Campus to tune into SLCC improvised and generated their own discussions.” 

I also found this Flickr pic uploaded by cambodia4kidsorg. It is a diagram of the technical set-up from a New Media Consortium event. The description includes an email response from Alan Levine about the set-up. In it, he writes:

“You could do some amount of streaming using an Apple XServe and QuickTime broadcasting– these are limited since each avatar accessing content in SL needs a sepearat connection, so you can run into bandwidth limitations– this is why we use a outside streaming service for audio– requests hit their network, not ours.” 

While we’re interested in learning more about the technical aspects of this style of production, we’re also seeking to learn more from those participants, and their experiences, attending these types of events. In particular, we’re interested to know if these types of technologies benefited, or distracted from, the participation of attendees. In addition, we’re looking at how this type of involvement “can help shape the tone and content of an event.” If you are one of these people, please consider sharing your experiences by leaving a comment on this post.In my next post, I’ll talk about a recent study conducted by the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham and what was learned about the participants involved in a mixed-reality lecture style event.