ONE Night – Projection
For the video feed TO your giant projector, it should definitely be a laptop running Second Life. This will be vastly higher quality than any sort of external live stream. For the video feed FROM ONE Night, it’s less critical for us, anything will let us see what’s going on and help cue. A better image is nice of course, and it’d let some remote viewers join in.
Google Hangouts
The strength of this platform is multiple participants. Up to 10 I believe. This is awesome. But it’s really crappy video.
Apple Facetime
Much better video than Hangouts, but only 1 person to 1 person, and you have to have an Apple device.
Ustream
This is a live stream so it’s not a “Hangout” but it does have group text chat and so on. It’s a pretty nice service. It streams well and has pretty good video quality. The only unfortunate thing about Ustream is that unlike a platform like Vimeo with their modestly priced “Plus” and “Pro” accounts, Ustream only has 2 choices: really expensive, and free but with ads. I don’t love the ads of course, but all things considered, it might be the best option. You can have all the viewers you like and record it as well. I imagine you’ll be shooting higher quality on-site video, but having one of your Siggraph peeps in charge of the Ustream cam might be worthwhile.
Projecting from SL
You’ll need someone to make an SL account and download the viewer to a laptop. You can make a free account here:
http://secondlife.com/
At the end of the signup process they’ll ask you to download “The Official” SL Viewer… instead of doing that, you can download the Firestorm Viewer here:
http://www.firestormviewer.org/downloads/
Once you’re running, we can help your operator learn In-World Camera Controls, which is kind of important, since whoever is doing that will be the VR Cinematographer – whatever they frame on the laptop is what will project at your site!
The person on the laptop could potentially be both the VR Cinematographer, and the VR Stage Manager… if they’re on headset with your RL Stage Manager, they can relay cues to us, and we’ll also have your Site Feed to help.
Our Entrances & Exits
There’s at least 2 ways we can do this:
- We could enter from the wings and exit to the wings. This would let you have the projection live on the building, and we could enter on cue… this might be better, but it requires a bit of cueing.
- We could also be dancing for an extended time before and after our cue, and let our “entrance” be you bringing the video feed up. This might be messier on your end, I’m not sure, but it’d require less precise cueing communication.
I think either way should be fine, whichever you prefer.
Ciara Finnegan 01:48 on 15/05/2014 Permalink |
Wow! This sounds like a really fantastic collaboration! I’m looking forward to 31st:-)
Michael J Masucci 13:12 on 15/05/2014 Permalink |
Thanks so much! Very helpful. I will share all this with the tech team and will get back to you next week with any questoins. We are so happy that you are going to be a BIG (pun intended) part of ONE Night and Fly-By.
Vanessa Blaylock 21:47 on 15/05/2014 Permalink |
Great Michael!
Just realized I made one mistake: the VR Cinematographer, can’t be the VR Stage Manager – or at least can’t be on the same laptop – whatever’s on their laptop screen will be the live projection, therefore they can’t open a chat window to talk to us, or it would project on the building. So we’ll need to be cued in some other way.