Kevin M Thomas is a name that should be familiar to fans of live music in Second Life. Kevin has been performing in Second Life since 2007 and has an inworld group with over 7,000 fans.
Being a musician of course is a portable skill and Kevin is taking advantage of that portable skill by taking his performances to other platforms. Today Kevin will be performing at a music jam event at 15:30 PDT in High Fidelity at hifi://open. That’s 23:30 British Summer Time … I think!
Kevin recently spoke to Caitlyn Meeks, Director of Content for High Fidelity and Caitlyn has posted some of that conversation in a blog post : Live Performance in High Fidelity.
There are some great points in this blog post and one of them is an issue I’ve raised before, the potential for Worldwide reach in virtual worlds, Kevin says :
Performing in VR requires incredible energy as a performer as you do not normally get the fan feedback as you would in real life, however the payoff is greater as you can build a much larger fan base in VR as no one is limited by where they live to attend a show.
Worldwide reach doesn’t just cover musicians, back in March I blogged : Comedian Sami Shah Exemplifies The Advantages Of Virtual World Reach. Storytellers, artists and film makers can all build reach via Virtual Worlds and as we move forward, more immersive Virtual Reality environments.
Another factor is of course collaboration, as Kevin points out :
This evolution and technology changes the world as musicians of every shape and size can perform real-time with anyone no matter where they are in the world! In this performance on June 10th we will all be in the same space located in Cleveland, Ohio, however we normally are worlds-apart performing in real time.
Today’s performance will involve performers in the same physical place, but as Kevin points out, they don’t have to be in the same space to perform in Virtual Reality, although as a non-musician I would imagine it would be difficult to perform when you are not together, however, this does happen in Virtual Worlds now, so it’s definitely feasible.
Collaboration also doesn’t just come from fellow musicians either, a performance in a Virtual World will require a set and Kevin, who comes from the USA, has found a partner in crime for those builds, an avatar known as Judas, who comes from the UK :
The HiFi performance space was built primarily by Judas who is a resident Blender content creator (who also taught me Blender modeling) and has one of the most creative minds in VR when it comes to creating an interactive scene. Judas has created the entire scene excluding the cruise ship which is provided by AlphaVersionD and the musical instruments which I created. The event will take place on AlphaVersionD’s Open domain (hifi://open) to which will have a custom interactive text chat element and video/audio streaming options for the performance.
This is part of the beauty of Virtual Worlds, not only are physical barriers knocked down in terms of who can see a performance, they are also knocked down in terms of who you can collaborate with and that’s a very powerful use case.
Read more about Kevin and his discussion with Caitlyn at the blog post I linked to earlier in this post, there’s plenty of interesting content there.