Nesti141206

From uvvy

Luca Nesti has been the first Italian singer to perform in Second Life, on Dec. 14 at Parioli. Reports on the event are beginning to appear on the Italian press (see below). Besides being the first by a well known Italian artist in Second Life, the performance itself has been very good: not only new technology but also, and this is what is really important, GOOD music. As in happens for well organized events in virtual reality, the artist and the audience had the feeling of BEING THERE.

On the technical side, as it frequently happens, at the beginning there have been some problems with the sound stream, quickly solved by the technical staff. This technology is still young, and unfortunately Second Life does not have integrated audio yet. An external system (Shoutcast) has been used to stream Luca's voice. The audio was delivered via a SHOUTcast streaming audio server. Used with Winamp and the SHOUTcast Source DSP plugin for Winamp, the SHOUTcast server permits piping voice to an audio stream that can be set as media URL and listened to by all participants. The performance of the streaming audio server and the quality of the audio stream were quite good.

About 45 avatars participated. Due to the well known technical limitations on the number of avatars that can be present simultaneously in a Second Life island, the live event was on an invitation-only basis and the island Parioli was full to the limit. Those who could not be present could see the performance on TV (channel 863 of SKY, Radio Deejay and streaming radio on www.secondlifeblog.it and www.secondlifeeventi.com. New performances have been scheduled on December 15 and 16 at the same time (22:30 CET).

Ater the performance, in his final words to the audience Luca has shared his thoughts on the huge potential of Second Life for live music events and thanked the organizer Bruno Cerboni of Virtual Italian Parks. Those who, like me, are not in their twenties anymore have remarked Luca's mention of Bruno as "the youngest among the present".