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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.