Over the weekend there were several hundred Second Life enthusiasts in San Francisco.
John Hartman (he blogs about Second Life and virtual worlds on his Thought Plasma blog) attended the conference and is sitting in PodTech’s offices now showing me some of the cool stuff he’s learned and some of the things he’s working on.
What caught my eye about John’s work is that he’s using machinima (which is a recording of Second Life’s environment and avatars) to do corporate training.
What’s unique about this is you can create virtual sets and presenters very inexpensively.
I remember visiting the set at TechTV (which was a real set that cost millions to design, build, and house). John could build a virtual copy for 1/1000th the real cost.
Some things he showed me was a singer who played a virtual concert. Her avatar was holding a guitar in Second Life. She was singing into a microphone thousands of miles away from the data center that houses Second Life’s computers (at parent company Linden Labs).
He recorded that singer and made a little movie out of it (uses Camtasia). Sorry, the movie isn’t yet up on the Web, he says he’ll try to get it up within the next week or so.
Another thing he does is use a program called CrazyTalk, which lets him animate the mouth of his avatar. He can give a speech and his avatar delivers it. He uses that to do corporate training to dispersed groups of programmers.
Other things he uses? Fraps, which lets you record machinima videos. Used to do Red vs. Blue, he thinks. But he says Camtasia is better for most of his screen-recording needs.
As to the Second Life conference he said the weirdest thing was being in a presence done by NOAA and right next to it was people selling sex toys. Ahh, the joys of a virtual world where the red light district is right next to the science lab. Heheh.
Rivers run Red caught his eye (they are an advertising agency) that are going to let you create your own video game using Second Life.
Oh, Eddie and Irina just got in and handed me a real newspaper all about virtual worlds. OK, that’s just so weird. I’ll get a photo up on Flickr in a few seconds.
Oh, Irina, nice video of the Zombies that attacked San Francisco on Saturday! No, that really has nothing to do with virtual worlds, I just included it cause it shows that real life is sometimes very strange, even stranger than what happens in virtual worlds.
I wonder if Zombies could do corporate training?
Tag:
Add to 
Bookmark Murdok:
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
Go to Scobleizer …