sonicviz

After a rough start due to some new client issues, we finally got rolling at the Alphaville Herald launch party in metaplace. Metaplace needs a few more things to assist live musicians, but it’s still in beta so it will evolve. The metaplace crew were rolling out updates to fix client bugs a couple of times during the gig, and it eventually settled down. Mucho Fun had by all!

Thanks to Hathead and Noma for the Interwebz jam , Pixleen and the alphacrew, and the Metaplace team.

After the metaplace gig I hopped over to videoranch , Mike Nesmith’s live music virtual world, for the launch of the memorial day musicrise festival. It used Activeworlds as the platform, and their live video streaming is very nicely integrated into the environment.

Sounded great to me. I love the scaling of the RL video to avatar size, another subtle cue that adds some more immersion to mixed reality gigs like this.

The First Tokyo barcamp was on last weekend.

I’d never been to a barcamp, so it was interesting to see the self organising presentation system at work.

After lunch I decided to do a little presentation on “The Future of Music”. Check the video out for my take on where I see some of this going, as a result of my prototyping of the Future of Music in Virtual Worlds such as SecondLife and Metaplace.

Music from YIS IT Department on Vimeo.

Here are links talked about in the video:
Bitstream Boogie: youtube.com/watch?v=XVHoNhiowVA
Music Immersion: youtube.com/watch?v=L8lBu22s8mQ
Videoranch (Nesmith): videoranch.com
Indabamusic: indabamusic.com/
Awdio: awdio.com/
Grooveshark: listen.grooveshark.com/
Temple U Japan SL Music study: sonicviz.com/wordpress/2009/04/11/second-life-and-the-future-of-the-music-industry/
Noteflight: noteflight.com/

Temple University Japan have been doing a study on the SL music scene, where a number of people inlcuding myself have been prototyping the future of music in virtual spaces.

The students have looked at various aspects of the music scene and have done some nice posters up illustrating their findings.

I streamed a short SL concert into the Real Life gallery space in Design Festa, Harajuku, Tokyo last night with Noma Falta joining me on Bass.vox from Atlanta via Ninjam. It was a borderline event in technical terms;-) but I think everyone had fun and it illustrated some ideas of what we are doing on the bleeding edge of performing inside virtual spaces to the real world.

The SecondTimes web magazine in Japan has an article on the exhibition (japanese).

I’ll add a link to the Temple University website of the exhibition when it is up.

I’ve been working on other projects the last year so this blog was put on the backburner, but I’m about to start blogging a couple of times a week on the new paradigm music business and the future of the music industry.

Stay Tuned!

I popped out yesterday to the Japan VW expo at Tokyo Big Sight . Some of the more interesting exhibits that caught my eye:

• Masterpiece - a “beta” multi-world 3d printing service from an Akihabara firm involved in gamedev. When the cost comes down and quality goes up these real models of avatars etc will become excellent merchandising items for online musicians to add to their marketing toolset.
• Eitarosoft’s mobile 3d virtual worlds. They have an interesting solution to scaling the system to allow up to 400 people to access a virtual town at one time. I’d tell you how but then I’d have to kill you…
• Vizimo’s lightweight funky world that supports up to 8 people at a time. Current version allows users to design physics enabled games/activitities from pre-built components [next version to allow import of user created content], with integrated sns.
• Daletto World has an interesting look, with flat 3d characters.
• SL ® was well represented, and opensim/realXtend also had some demos from 3rd party providers.

After attending the virtual worlds party in the early evening I visited the Tokyo 2.0 SNS party next door, the Japan SNS and Linux worlds events being held concurrently in the same hall as the virtual worlds event. Fortunately the beer and food at the web 2.0 party proved to be a little more real than the virtual worlds one!

A gaggle of VW people then met back at Bar Tube in Shibuya, where Philip Rosedale signed the Toilet Door, a tradition at Kanda-san’s bar when visited by internutz celebrities.

Another loose bar tube jam session eventuated with a number of people swapping off on different instruments - Hayashi-san from Impress on drums/bass, Kanda-san [owner of BarTube and well know IT/Video journalist] on bass, japanese j-rock guitar legend Hatake-san on bass/guitar, Komuso on harp/bass [badly I might add!], various jpop singers, Jets Fride on guitar/Bass and even Philip Rosedale attacking the flying V - though we had some trouble tuning that beast and it took Hatake-san to finally tame it into submission! Rock and Roll!

All images © Paul Cohen 2008, apart from image to above right © Yabush Yamdev 2008