Photo courtesy Mars Sanford.

Photo courtesy Mars Sanford.

Photo courtesy Triss Gray.

Photo courtesy Triss Gray.

Yours truly. Photo courtesy Miss Schecki.

Photo courtesy Miss Schecki.

Ah, some excellent news to report today: that ITG's first-ever "mesh" event, held this last Friday, was pulled off with almost no technical glitches at all, and that the party was a resounding success all around. Well, thank God for that! In a period in my life marked mostly by frustration over my low-end tech equipment, it was nice to finally have one tech-heavy experiment actually work (for the most part, but see below for that); and I admit, it was a real kick to try to pull off the experiment as well, although definitely frustrating too while the event was actually happening.

For those who don't know, these "mesh" events are a test of sorts I'm running right now, to see whether I can throw parties and artistic events in two locations at once -- both in Second Life and in a physical location in Chicago, where I live -- and connect the two via text-based chat, streaming audio and Skype conversations. This was all inspired, as long-time readers know, by my simultaneous enjoyment and frustration with other such live events in the grid; how cool it is to be able to listen to an event going on halfway across the world, but how something simply seems to be missing when a physical audience isn't present. The way I figured it, if you were going to all the trouble of setting up such a system in the first place, and inviting a musician or poet or whoever over to your apartment to do such a show, you might as well invite five or ten of their friends to come along as well; that way the microphones pick up the ambient noises of that audience (stray conversation, bottles clinking, etc), and the show really does end up with live crowd sounds even when inside Second Life.

Anyway, the photos above show you how everything went, both in the grid and in my tiny Chicago apartment; at its maximum, I had maybe 10 people attending on the Chicago side and 15 in SL, for a grand total attendance of 25 or so, which is exactly what I was shooting for. And much more importantly, the combination of Skype and Nicecast I had running throughout the party seemed to be a really robust one, with no one on the SL side seemingly having any permanent problems getting the signal, and with the streaming server staying up pretty much the entire evening. For those who are curious, by the way, I had the mic running live the entire party, not just during the artistic performances; how it worked is that I would get on it every ten minutes or so, saying hi to partygoers or introducing them to someone new who had just showed up in Chicago, then otherwise just leave the mic resting against one of the music speakers here in Chicago, so that SL partygoers were listening to the same mix at the same time that the physical attendees. (Oh, and thanks, by the way, for the many compliments I got for my music selection; I'm a former college DJ, after all, so I'm still highly flattered when someone compliments my taste in indie-rock.)

Oh, and speaking of artistic performances, that went pretty well too -- we ended up with four pieces from Chicago partygoers, from poetry to sketch comedy, and even had a musician from Sweden named Bjorn Erikksson (I hope I'm spelling that right) Skype in from his place, and provide us with some live postmodern clarinet songs between each spoken-word piece! Wow, that's cool! That's my whole point of trying these mesh events in the first place; to see if interesting interactive things can be done via text, voice and video, using performers around the world and a technology that can bring them all together. Having a bunch of drunken Chicago performance poets in my apartment sharing a virtual stage with a musician in Sweden was definitely a highlight of the evening for me, and something I hope will happen with a lot more frequency at future events.

Of course, as I mentioned, the party did have its share of technical flubs as well, although like I said not nearly as many as I was expecting...

--The biggest technical problem concerned a Linksys WiFi router I picked up over the holidays for my apartment; namely, I couldn't get it calibrated in time for the party, and my tech-expert brother was on assignment in New York so didn't have time to help me. That in turn disrupted quite badly my original plan for making this all technically work: to run Second Life on my Mac Mini through my television, using the WiFi signal, then run the audio software on my Mac G3 and normal monitor, hooked up to a DSL hard line since it doesn't have WiFi. Without the working router, though, I ended up only able to have either one computer online or the other; and since the Mini is the only one of the two that can run Second Life, I had to opt for that. So, I ended up running everything at once on my Mini, which I was scared to do since it doesn't multitask very well -- not only Second Life, but also Nicecast and Skype and Firefox. Thank God it all held together!

--And then the biggest logistical problem was simply one of manpower; namely, do you have any idea how difficult it is to host two parties at two locations at the same time?! Jeez, it's hard enough just hosting one party, what with getting the door and fetching drinks and stowing coats and the like; now imagine that every time you're doing one of those tasks, you've effectively disappeared from the Second Life party, and that sitting and typing in Second Life effectively takes you out of the physical party as well. A definite thing I'm looking to do for future events is to get me a co-host; one who can manage things full-time virtually, while I hop in and out between them and the physical event. Anyone interested? Drop me a line at inthegrid [at] gmail.com and let me know!

--And then finally, let's face it, it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to be the only person at the Chicago party with Second Life experience. The crowd here in Chicago, in fact, many of which had never been in the grid before, were naturally obsessed with it, hovering around the screen and asking me a million questions about what can be done there; but with me hosting two parties, on a low-end Mac that was one sneeze away from crashing, I simply didn't have time to answer questions, or to do a lot of moving around on-screen. It would be great at future events, frankly, to get some more SL-involved Chicagoans attending, and to bring their own SL-equipped set-ups; that way we could have two or three portals into Second Life at the Chicago half of the parties, with lots of people there to answer questions, conduct tours, etc.

All in all, though, I'm definitely not complaining; in fact, I'm celebrating that it came off as relatively bug-free that it did, and that I had so many people interested in attending. Based on this first success, in fact, I can unequivocally state that the "mesh" experiments will be continuing, with the next one probably coming in just a couple of weeks. Interested in performing at a future party? Just drop me a line and let me know; I welcome all people with the necessary tech and who have something interesting to do on a mic. Thanks again to everyone who attended and performed; and I hope to see all of you and more at our next one.