After a long day running from one meeting to another and conference calling half of the world, I got a lift to the airport to get on the afternoon flight to Munich. I’m tired. I’ve been overclocking the entire weekend to get things done in Second Life for the launch of Vista, talking to club owners, building the branded player, making sure everyone could operate it and looking for locations where the club owners could put it on their land. I had a lot of help from my friends in Second Life, networking for me and guiding me to the right people to talk to. The power of an online community is simply amazing.
I met a nice guy named Arnout Saedt, and he’s the owner of the Second Life version of the Atomium. Since he has no media rights on the land where he’s currently living, we decided it would be best to rebuild the Atomium on the Strawberry Estate. And so, now we have our own virtual version of the event location in real life. I cleaned out all the spheres and I’ve placed plasma screens inside them. Each sphere can host 10 people. The entire Belgian online community is welcome there to participate in the event. (just look up ‘Coolz0r Courier’ or ‘Strawberry Estate’ in the search, and you’ll get there). Arnout did a wonderful job. This is so very cool!
Then I also had a great and thorough conversation with Bruno Cerboni, who is the Founder and CEO of Virtual Italian Parks S.r.l. (the first Italian company in Italy offering SL services), a company formally incorporated in Italy. He is also one of the Founders of the European Consortium VRParks: http://www.vrparks.eu | http://vrparks.eu/?About:Virtual_Italian_Parks - The company is supported by the E2Blab incubator at the Tor Vergata University in Rome.
Bruno is an engineer (degree at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”). He had a 30 years career as a Manager in the field of Information Technology and created the first Italian SIM in Second Life: Parioli , which consistently ranks in 2 of SL’s Top 10 (non-adult) Most Popular Places and reaches from 20,000 to 30.000 daily traffic; Bruno has developed the unique 2L holographic environment using an immersive approach. The entire Italian SIM (region) is cooperating with the Vista Project. Visit Rome in virtual life, and experience the Vista launch near the Colosseum. It’s as impressive as it sounds.
The Mermaids Gentlemans Club is also participating. The club’s dance floor is directly above the water surface, and if you look down, they’ve created the illusion of a subtropical coral reef. It lights up in the dark and it’s taken quite some work to make it look so special. A wonderful location to check out, filled with very nice people.
Another cool region that participates is the ‘Isle Of Lesbos’, named after the famous Mediterranean island. It’s a huge region with a load of traffic to take your hat off for and bow gracefully. The paradise beach is at our disposal and has the most romantic sunset I’ve seen so far. It’s a huge waterfront with close to it a city that looks like it’s the remains of ancient ruins, but crowded with people. You just have to check it out. Too bad they don’t sell vacations to the virtual world and teleport your ‘real life you’ to this fabulous location. It’s close to heaven.
The Sanctuary Rock is also pleased to host our live concert. According to my contactman Schinoa, the Gothic/Medieval castle with a huge crowd of Lords Of Acid lovers (the international name of Praga Khan) is eager to join in. The Second Life stats indicate this place pulls over 50.000 avatars a day, and it ranks in the top 10 of most visited/popular locations. It’s a very special place that looks like it’s been ripped out of some lord of the rings scene, but this too is a perfect location to set up the streams.
Closing the ranks, but not being less attractive, are the ShowGirls Gentlemen’s Club and Liquid Dreams. Both clubs have a special style of decoration and attract their typical crowd of regulars. Time and again, these two places are jammed with avatars that want to be part of the events that are being hosted. This is the perfect time to pay these clubs a visit. Explore them, you won’t be sorry !
So. Right now I’m setting up the billboards. I think I’m going to upload them tomorrow and start placing them everywhere I can to get as much visibility as possible. Last time I checked, the stream we’re sending into the virtual world should be able to manage 2000 requests. I know we’re aiming below that with this selective list of clubs, but you have to have a limit somewhere. Especially when you have 3 huge regions participating where multiple players can be placed to serve the audience. We’ll see where we end up. The important part is that we can reach out to those who really want to be part of the event, and that we can offer them a nice atmosphere “to experience the wow”.
