Way back at the first salon meeting in April 2005, Jim Purbrick AKA
Babbage Linden discussed the idea of "inhabited TV"--different flavors
of TV and video made social in massively multi-player virtual worlds. I
like this as a compliment to "interactive TV." Notes and link to audio
of Jim's talk at http://tinyurl.com/pxbyk .

On Monday night there's an interesting test case of a kind of inhabited
TV in Second Life. Major League Baseball and ESPN will be streaming
live video of the annual Home Run Derby into SL on Monday at 5 PM PST.
The Electric Sheep Company (who I work with as resident futurist)
created a stadium venue with a scaled-down field and cute little
bobble-headed avatar players who virtually recreate and track the hits
that their real life counter-parts are making. So participants in SL
have the traditional TV experience of the real thing, plus the
heightened (erm, shortened? :) simulation, plus the avatar
communication with other people. Chris Carella explains more:
http://blogs.electricsheepcompany.com/chris/?p=92 .

Tickets to the event cost $1,000L or a little over $3US. If you're not
into baseball (I don't normally follow it myself) this is still a
really interesting new kind of event that might trailblaze the way for
similar events in SL and other virtual worlds. If any saloners can make
it out, as of right now there are 15 tickets left at
http://www.slboutique.com/index.php?p=buy&itemid=92132 or
http://tinyurl.com/rorfs .

I'll be at the MLB.com offices helping to run this on Monday, so my
avatar may be in and out. BTW I'm the very happy owner of a new MacBook
Pro so I can finally easilly run SL in the background while I work on
other things. This means I'll be inworld more than I have been in in a
while. Look me up as SNOOPYbrown Zamboni!

Jerry/SNOOP

Some blog links:

Micro Persuasion:
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/07/mlb_to_simulcas.html
3pointD:
http://www.3pointd.com/20060707/a-day-at-the-virtual-ballpark-with-mlbcom/
Eightbar:
http://eightbar.co.uk/2006/07/08/baseball-and-wimbledon-in-secondlife/

Jim Purbrick/Babbage Linden on inhabited tv from the April '05 salon:

>>>"The idea behind that is that a lot of people watch TV, and a lot of people
play computer games, but what’s in the middle? So we were looking at some of the
things where on the one end people are watching avatars in a virtual world
wander around and then they can decide they can watch it as a story, they can
get involved in the story, they can decide they want to be one of the characters
and then they can move through the screen again and then decide to be part of
the story. So we did a couple of experiments with that. We took over a theatre
in Manchester and we showed the show to an audience who was sitting down in the
theatre, and then in the same theatre we had people on work stations actually
interacting in the virtual world taking part in the story, and potentially
people could move from the back room to the front room, and they could move
across that boundary from watching to participating in the story. And I think
this is a really good example because it’s kind of already happening in Second
Life. As soon as the video stuff started happening there’s lots of interesting
people making videos in Second Life starring people in Second Life. And you can
imagine that once that stuff gets going that people are going to be making
stories in Second Life, some people are going to come across it and they’re just
going to watch it and it’s going to be interesting, it’s going to be a TV show
made in a virtual world which is interesting in and of itself. But then on that
Web page they’re streaming that video from, we can have underneath that: ‘If you
want to be a part of this, go and get yourself a Second Life account and then
become part of the story that you’ve been watching.’ So Inhabited TV is a really
good example of something that’s sort of happening in Second Life already."