RE: Performance report
The performance on Friday night went fairly well. The fellow on before me was excellent (Hawk). Extremely well-produced music. Other than having a ten year old girl from South Dakota getting friendly (Where are the parents of these kids???), it was the same as the usual gig. Some points: 1. It is easy to lose the system without enough resources to sustain multiple windows. Avoid private chats. My browser would crash and I would have to get back in and get the av back into position. 2. The perspectives of some worlds make it harder to see than others. Sometimes, invite avs that chat to come forward. Probably a good idea once a performance to get as many as you can forward so you can get a good screen snap. 3. It may be a good idea to get the world builder to put in a viewpoint for you. That way, if it crashes, you can get back into position easier. Not sure how that would be done. 4. It would be interesting to consider the medium. These worlds are built for free-roaming chat. Yet, as graphics, they could be improved by considering that positions can be a bit more organized visually. This is something for stage builders to consider: automated blocking, perhaps but gridding the world and having a script to set positions. I think the online concerts are picking up attention. The audio is good enough and the experience interesting enough to work. Len Bullard [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -Original Message- From: Dennis McKenzie [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, September 02, 1999 10:26 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Performance report ob-vrml-lit: If you build interesting content, at least some people will pay attention to it, even if it involves sitting still in front of the computer listening to an unaccompanied human voice for 20 minutes. How much better we should be able to capture imaginations with compelling visuals, motion, music/sound effects, and interactivity... Blaxxun offers a way to make custom behaviors for their actors ( er, uh, avs ;). Making a stage (I mean world) blaxxun compliant is pretty easy. We have stories, music, set designers. Tell me something isn't itching to be tried here. Dennis Geometrek VRML solutions - http://geometrek.com
RE: Performance report
I like the idea of ten year olds liking that song not the singer. See http://www.bewitched.net/samsong.htm Amazing how fast this was picked up. Already getting fan mail for it. No money... but nice mail. Good suggestions, Niclas. I have been thinking a lot over the weekend as I read the junk happening over XHTML namespaces if what we are seeing is the reemergence of helper apps as a dominant species. It makes sense. Trying to build everything inside the browser framework makes less and less sense when what one really wants is standard opSys support for network interfaces and ancillary content handlers. Yep, VB/COM EAI is how I would have to do it too. Easier. But what I will do is focus on the music and let the better enabled build software. Len Bullard Intergraph Public Safety [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
Re: Performance report
"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote: Other than having a ten year old girl from South Dakota getting friendly (Where are the parents of these kids???), it was the same as the usual gig. Sounded exactly like a usual gig then (with the groupies et all:) Some points: 1. It is easy to lose the system without enough resources to sustain multiple windows. Avoid private chats. My browser would crash and I would have to get back in and get the av back into position. Priviliged avatars. Allow people to leave their "crash faced" avatars in. Give em 2-5 min to get back into them after crash. more below... 2. The perspectives of some worlds make it harder to see than others. Sometimes, invite avs that chat to come forward. Probably a good idea once a performance to get as many as you can forward so you can get a good screen snap. This is where "seek" works fairly good. Another thing could be dimmed private worlds where you would only see your private chatters. The rest would be in a fog or just dimmed out. 3. It may be a good idea to get the world builder to put in a viewpoint for you. That way, if it crashes, you can get back into position easier. Not sure how that would be done. Could be fairy easy. Make it possible to store your own viewpoints and make them persistant. Either the worldbuilder does this or the guys holding the system behind it. 4. It would be interesting to consider the medium. These worlds are built for free-roaming chat. Yet, as graphics, they could be improved by considering that positions can be a bit more organized visually. This is something for stage builders to consider: automated blocking, perhaps but gridding the world and having a script to set positions. This should be totally up to the stage builders or even the coreogfx's people. However somehow it has to be covered by the underlying mu-tech i guess. I think the online concerts are picking up attention. The audio is good enough and the experience interesting enough to work. I finaly got some time to start doing COM EAI. It's very easy with VB to build your own client and put in some behavior, with C++ it get's more effecient but takes longer time (as usual). It's nice to be able to use VRML without the overhead of a HTML browser. Sort of back to basic again. It would be nice to be able to use these clients as plugins to eg Winamp. Currently I'm doing some experiments with it, but the soundcard on my machine at home is broken so I can't do any winamp stuff there and at work I'm supposed to be doing .. something else. Whatever, what it means is that when you tune in to one of your mp3 radio stations via Winamp your mu-vrml-browser plugin would load a scene with all others connected to that mp3 station. Sort of cool I think. The other cool feature I put myself upto is getting the vrml to work with winamp in a way that it reacts to the music. This isn't exactly hard to do, but I need to get them connected and have some AV's that can dance before I go any further on that. Anyway, the result would be a stage with AV's representing the band currently playing. Should be stored on local device (for instance your a CD you get from the mp3 station). It would be easier to sync that way and there is no need for MU in that. Performance shouldn't be much of a problem. Most of the heavy stuff is done outside the browser, in VB or C++ (whatever COM). Earlier I did bumbper texturing in Java (and CP via JSAI) but now I converted it into C++. Runs MUCH MUCH faster and the memory stoped leaking. The downside is ofcourse that you can't use your favourite browser, but I'm sort of fed up with all the hazzle it takes to get it working. Even though this isn't web-browser friendly I hope someone wants to use it. Now I even fooled my brother into this now so the community is allready there :) Well, enough for today, I don't get payed for fooling around with VRML anymore :-\ /Niclas
RE: Performance report
That is precisely how most solo gigs go in reality. Get a steady gig and watch the crowds change. A steady gig requires a persistent place to perform so those that like it know how to find you, when, and where. Persistence is everything in the performing arts. Get some surfers and then folks will get interested in improving the tech. There should be a way to get to the performance and bypass the front chat screens. What we have will start the siphon and that starts the competition. Len Bullard [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
Re: Performance report
ob-vrml-lit: If you build interesting content, at least some people will pay attention to it, even if it involves sitting still in front of the computer listening to an unaccompanied human voice for 20 minutes. How much better we should be able to capture imaginations with compelling visuals, motion, music/sound effects, and interactivity... Blaxxun offers a way to make custom behaviors for their actors ( er, uh, avs ;). Making a stage (I mean world) blaxxun compliant is pretty easy. We have stories, music, set designers. Tell me something isn't itching to be tried here. Dennis Geometrek VRML solutions - http://geometrek.com
