Beyond SL & Genoa & Live Concert

My dear friend Toni Cao logged in SL and I contated her at once by SL Instant Messenger. I invited her in Rome and we had an extremly nice conversation about recent issues in SL and real world. Toni is a RL journalist and has a carrier in new media genre for an service that spreads ICT articles all over the Italy for newspapers and online magazines. She uses a lot of her time to be aware about new trends in digital and collaborative medias such as SL. Actually she get paid for living in this virtual world: what a job she has!

Toni brang out a detail of highly respectful Gartner research. It has been estimated that 80 % of world wide internet connected population will have an avatarby by the end of 2011. So why wouldn't we spend some time to get known with these new possibilities of learning and collaboration and - for god sake - living!

Toni is interested in my "sort of research work" about my journey in virtual worldof Second Life. She suggested that she might write an article about my experiences regarding the notes I will make if I only could write a short description about my goals so that she could first show it to her boss. What a wonderful person she is! I promised to think about the nice idea.

She was terrified about the news from Finland. Some of the Italian news papers and web magazines has picked up the kills of eight people in the Jokela high school in Southern Finland. Usually all those news from Finland had concerned about positive issues such as Nokia mobiles and educational Pisa researches. What a sad day on Thursday indeed. Well, life continues but our minds carries now a painful part among the others, more pleasant. This deals somehow with virtual worlds and societies regarding the authorities' statesments because the killer had at least some contacts and had played shooting games in the internet.



Toni lives in Genoa, North Italy and wanted to show me virtual Genoa in SL. We teleported in there and she told me there was a very well detailed old harbour of Genoa in 3D. It really was amazing. Some italian men introduced themselves to us. They were avatars from a group that had a project going on of builing the historic centre of Genoa in SL. They presented us the area and we took a boat and saw nice buildings and sceneries all over.

Later on the guys started to flirt on us! Well, it just was so predictable: it is so italian. Toni is very social and good looking...and I am a blonde myself... no wonder (lol)! After all they got an idea: wanted Toni as a guide regarding to her knowledge of local places and journalistic skills.

After this session Toni wanted to go listen to one of her oldest SL friends, Luigi DiPrima, who was playing guitar and singing in a live concert on the stage. The end of the evening (and maybe half of the night) ran in really nice way listening nice tone of Luigi's voice and fluentguitar playing. I think the audience got what it had come to get: I assume Luigi got tippd quite well. Thatbrings to my mind that I did not have any Linden dollars cause I was still unimployed in SL and did not want to buy any currency. Then Toni just gave me 100 L$ so that I could give 20 L$ as a tip to themusician. The rest I will waste on "free" items. :)

Sound in virtual world. Yes, it really is possible. Not just audio feeds but also live concerts and conferences. Of course avatars can use voice chat also to speak out their thoughts. The quality of sound depends most of all on the capacity of client's computer. In some parts thevoice disconnected while Luigi was singing for an hour. Afterwards he jumped off from the stage, hugged Toni and chatted with us. Very pleasant evening indeed!