Last week, I had an opportunity to be attendee (other then speaker this time) at one of our Visual Studio 2008 launch events. This was no ordinary Microsoft launch event. I didn’t even have to leave my home office to attend. This particular launch event took place in the metaverse known as Second Life.
I was a little skeptical at the prospects of this type of event and how it would play out. After all, I didn’t want to see any flying male genitalia while I was sitting in on a discussion on Visual Studio 2008 web development features. I mustered up the gumption to try out this new medium and see how it would all go down. I will have to say, I was quite impressed.
I’ve logged on to Second Life a couple of times before to see what all the fuss was about. I never really made it past the introductory area where they teach you how to move around and interact with the environment. When I logged on for the launch event, I just typed in “Microsoft Launch” in the search area and it listed the exact location of where I needed to go. I selected the “Visual Studio Island” (Yes… we own an island in Second Life) and clicked “Transport” and it beemed me to where I needed to go.
There was a main lobby area where there were a number of volunteers offering people help of where to go. “The Visual Studio sessions are to your left…the SQL Server sessions are over there…and the Windows Server sessions are over here”. Each session area had its own auditorium with seats for attendees, a stage, and a big screen to present the slide decks on.
The day consisted of a full launch agenda with 4 sessions for each track. J Sawyer, another Developer Evangelist co-hort out of Houston, kicked off the Visual Studio track. J or “Elwyn Nightfire”, his Second Life persona, came flying into the stage (yes, flying… flying is a big part of moving around in Second Life and who doesn’t want to fly???) and through voice chat, delivered a great session on introducing Visual Studio 2008. The slides are apparently uploaded as image files into the Second Life area and J, as the presenter, had the control to advance the images/slides just as you would in a “normal” presentation.
The technical challenge was how could you show code and demos. Unfortunately, Second Life doesn’t have an option to stream in a desktop session. What the crafty virtual launch team came up with was to utilize Live Meeting for all the demo portions of the sessions. When it was time to do a demo, the presenter would send out the Live Meeting URL in the chat window where each attendee could fire up a Live Meeting session and watch the presenter walkthrough the demo steps in real time. The trick is to leave Second Life maximized in the background so the audio from the voice chat would still come through as Live Meeting was running in the foreground. This actually worked really well. Especially well if you had two monitors. One monitor for the Second Life “in world” experience, and the second monitor for the Live Meeting demos.
There were a few hiccups here and there, but all in all it was a great experience. Zain Naboulsi (Csharp Writer), our Developer Evangelist co-hort down in Dallas, has been leading the “Virtual” evangelism charge at Microsoft and is a true believer in these types of experiences. He has been pushing Second Life (and other metaverses) as a way to reach out to the large audiences that we can’t normally reach, all at a much lower cost than what we pay for live events such as our MSDN events. Zain also supports a user group that holds all of their meetings in Second Life. They are, of course, the Second Life .NET Developers User Group. I have yet to attend one of their meetings, but I would expect the experience is the same.
I have to say that I was impressed by this event and it really got me thinking about ways we can extend our evangelism reach beyond our typical audiences. What I liked about Second Life versus a typical webcast was the interaction. You could voice chat or text chat with all of the other attendees. This truly enhanced the experience. It was an opportunity to hold discussions, through voice chat or text chat, among the attendees that you just can’t do through something like a typical MSDN webcast.
I’m in the process of trying to plan an in-person hands-on lab road show. I was trying to think of a way that I could utilize Second Life to reach a larger audience. With Second Life, I could offer up these same instructor-led lab experience for individuals who aren’t located in the cities I plan to hold these “real life” events in. Sure, I could provide all of the materials for you to do the labs yourself, but you miss out in that interactivity with other people. Learning as part of a group is typically more beneficial than trying to fight through it yourself.
What do you think? Would you attend something like this? I would still have to figure out the technical details, but I’m sure its possible.
The one thing about this “experience” is that there is certainly a ramp up time to get used to interacting and moving around in Second Life. Once you get past those little details, that opportunities seem to be endless. Oh, and if you find yourself in Second Life sometime, look for “Davcor Hax”. That’s me.
Photos from the event: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26049813@N05/show/
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