Teach42

Before I get started, MAJOR kudos to the DEN in Second Life Leadership Council who have done a phenomenal job of putting together a truly amazing weekly series of presentations. It’s one of the best sources of professional development that you probably didn’t even know existed. And the speakers don’t just focus on Second Life either.

So last night I had the opportunity to present. The way I figure it, Second Life is all about breaking down boundaries and trying to see how far we can push technology, education, and most importantly our own perceptions of what is and isn’t possible. With that in mind, I sat down and thought about what I liked and didn’t like about presenting in Second Life.

When I first presented in Second Life, the thing that I disliked the most was the fact that I had to type out the entire presentation. Yes, I could have pre-typed it all and used a script to display it all, but that’s just not the way I roll. So the entire presentation was almost an exercise to see how well I could type over a long period of time. Not too fun, and I’d imagine that while it may have been novel for the audience, it must have been pretty tedious.

All that changed when they introduced voice chat. Now all of a sudden, I could just talk normally and everybody could hear me in real time. HUGE improvement. However, there were other challenges still in place. For example, in order to show slides, you need to take a PowerPoint, save it as JPG images, renumber them (adding in a leading 0), upload them into Second Life (which costs 10 Lindens per image) and then put them into a viewer of some sort. Even once you’d done all that, you still had to deal with issues like other people hijacking your presentation and clicking through it while you’re trying to present. And of course, depending on how large your images are, often they take quite a long time to rez (and you never know whether other people are seeing the same thing you’re seeing).

Of course, the final issue is always that durn avatar. I’m a multi-tasker, but there’s no way that I can realistically present coherently and make my avatar do interesting things at the same time. I’m just not that talented.

As I see it, the solution for so many of these problems is live video streaming. To go from a frozen avatar waiting for his slides to rez, to a live talking head that can switch back and forth to a presentation or screencast-demo. I’d heard that there were ways to stream into Second Life, but most of those presentations were big ones done by major corporations, likely spending oodles of money. With a little elbow grease and some creative thinking though, I thought surely there must be a way to do it.

And there was.

Step 1: Veodia
Veodia is a streaming site that I knew from the Office 2.0 conference. They have very high quality streams and the ability to watch them via some mobile devices, iPhone included. However, interestingly enough, they also provide an RTSP link for their streams. I don’t know much about RTSP, but what I do know is that it can be used to stream into Second Life. So I set up an account there and got my webcam groove on.

Step 2: Create your ‘video screen’ in Second Life
Just create an object, any object. Apply a unique texture to one surface of it. Why unique? The live stream is going to replace ALL instances of this texture. So if you use it anywhere else, it’ll be replaced by the live video. No, I don’t know what will happen if you use the same texture on some clothing, but I do intend to find out.

Step 3: Tweak your land settings
Yes, you do need to have permission to modify land settings. Or, depending on where you’re presenting, you could have a land owner do this for you. By going to World -> About Land and clicking over to the Media tab, you can choose a specific texture for your lands streaming media. Apply the same texture that you used in Step 2 here. Then, choose Movie from the drop down box and for the URL, paste in your Veodia streams RTSP link.

Step 4: Click Play
At this point, all you need to do is rez your video screen and click play from the movie controls for the land (lower right corner of your screen). Once you do that, the texture you choose will be replaced by your live video stream. Don’t forget to smile for the crowd!

That’s it. Pretty darn simple when you get right down to it. And then all of a sudden your face is streaming live into Second Life as big or small as you want. Since Second Life is memory intensive, and so is streaming video, and all of my computers are pretty underpowered, I actually streamed from a different computer than I was running Second Life on.

Of course, beaming myself into Second Life was a neat trick, the goal was to improve my ability to present in Second Life. This means I had to get around those wonky PowerPoint presentations. I wanted to share my desktop in real time, to be able to display websites and navigate them without dealing with all the slow rezzing issues. To tackle this one, I turned to a free piece of software called Split Cam. It’s PC only, but you could also use Many Cam or CamTwist to do the same thing. Basically it serves as a virtual camera that sites between your streaming server and your webcam. Using Veodia, I choose SplitCam as my camera, and SplitCam displayed my webcam to be streamed. However, with a couple of clicks, I could switch and have SplitCam display my desktop instead. So far as Veodia was concerned, my desktop was just another webcam to display. By doing this, I could share everything happening on my desktop through that same video stream.

Not only did it work, it worked REALLY well. I could show web sites. I could demonstrate software. I could even pop open PowerPoint and start a slideshow full screen. It displayed the exact same slides I’d want to show in Second Life, but it did so INSTANTLY for everybody watching. No waiting to rez. I could click through it as fast as I could want and no need to wait for people to catch up. Very slick. I highly recommend it as a means for presenting.

To be honest, if I had left it there it would have been plenty. But there was one thought that I couldn’t get out of my head. “I’m still tied to my desk. How can I get away from it?” I suppose I could have tried to find a wireless webcam, but that still would have had limitations.

I have been exploring methods of streaming live video via cell phone recently. Qik looks like it has huge promise, but while they announced Blackjack support last week, as of writing this they still haven’t been able to deliver. Which brings me to CometNow. While CometNow has major UI issues, an awful embeddable widget, and is in dire need of a proper support page, it DOES allow you to create a live video stream from most Windows Mobile devices, and it works very very well. How to bring that stream into Second Life tho?

I wound up going about it the old fashioned way. I started a live feed on my phone first. Then I used SplitCam to display my desktop and loaded up the CometNow page. I made it full screen and voila! Cell phone streaming to CometNow. CometNow displayed full screen on my computer. SplitCam sharing my desktop to Veodia. Veodia sending the stream into Second Life. I actually had to crank up my computer speakers and then the webcam picked up and rebroadcast the audio.

And then I took a walk! It started off badly tho. I wanted to show Aiden to the group, but it turns out he wasn’t asleep yet. He kinda sorta started screaming which made the Wife justifiably pissed. But I was able to take the people in SL watching down the stairs, through the living room, out the back door and into my backyard. Live. I could have walked around the block. Driven to Walgreens. Jogged a few miles. And taken the audience with me the entire time.

Yes, the video was choppy. Clearly I was pushing this computer (and my broadband connection) way past the red line. But the fact is, it worked, and I was able to do it for free.

Streaming live from my backyard into Second Life. Who would have thought it? It was a very cool little experiment that worked, but really it was more proof of concept than anything else. How can it be done more elegantly? What possibilities does this open up? What do you do with this sort of ‘power’? And how can we use it to improve education?

I’d love to say that I have those answers, but I don’t. But maybe you do. Hopefully you’ll take this experiment and try it out yourself. And then see how far you can stretch it yourself…

Click here to view some images from the presentation