Virtual Live Performance

Stefan Giusti, Charles Murphy, Jeffrey Bolkhovsky, Dean Gianotti, and James Tardanico

For this project, students created a play that they performed live in the networked virtual world of Second Life. Over one hundred people were invited to the virtual island where the performance took place. The students wrote the play, designed and built elaborate sets, built characters with animations, programmed code to automate scene changes, and performed live for a remote audience distributed all over the world. The students controlled their characters with computer keyboards while speaking into microphones connected to the Second Life network. Second Life is a virtual networked 3D space created by Linden Labs. It is populated by perhaps 50,000 people on any given day.