Secondfest: a pretty decent attempt at a virtual festival

This past weekend, The Guardian sponsored a virtual festival in Second Life, the online alternate reality environment. Here's a few snippets of what I had to say about it on my work blog:

On the whole, it looked just like a real-life music festival: several stages, a campsite complete with tents, drinks stalls and whatnot. But this is exactly what let things down in my mind. Why would you build an exact replica of a real-life festival in an environment where you could have virtually anything?...

... Audio and video streams were intermittently dropping, and many newbies who didn't know how to do the SL-equivalent of banging the top of the telly when it loses the signal, were disappointed. And the rest of us were even more disappointed to find that many of the acts weren't actually 'performing' at all. The organisers simply played a recording and broadcast it into the festival. Seeing and hearing a live performance is the core reason for going to any gig, so this was a real let down. Had I paid anything, I would have felt royally ripped off. Fortunately, some of the artists who did perform live made up for the others...

Read the full story & comments here on the NESTA blog >>