Croquet 2 Play

Take a look at this video of a live jazz event. It takes place at a place called Clyde in Second Life. In it you’ll see people in the audience dancing - you don’t dance at web sites …

Soon after logging in, I realized that Second Life could be a venue for live music performance, and my career in Second Life, as musician Astrin Few, took off. I have been performing twice a week in Second Life ever since, playing acoustic guitar/vocal jazz on Tuesday nights and jazz/pop/rock at hired gigs on Sunday nights. In February, a sax player in Miami named Brian Tervo (”Flaming Moe” in Second Life) and I performed a duo concert in Second Life - I send my guitar/vocal stream to him, to which he adds his sax before sending it out to the public. You can view a video and download the CD from that concert or read a review of the show. Many other musicians have begun to perform live in Second Life in recent months.

Note that these collaborative technologies have nothing to do with the Web. As our friend Preston Austin of Clotho Advanced Media summarized recently at an Accelerate Madison presentation describing an exciting new 3D collaborative technology called Croquet: “the Web sucks”.

Internet Collaboration & Application Development, Chicago, IL
Back in October, says Flaming Moe, “I searched Events for ‘jazz’ one day… and found ‘Astrin Few, Live at Clementina’. I had to check it out to see if it was some sort of joke or the real deal. Sure enough, he was streaming live at the park and sounded great. He even took requests!”

Moe and Few shared notes, honed their chops, and two Sundays ago, debuted an in-world first, from a forest-shrouded stage in Clive*: a live combo performance, with Astrin in the Midwest, Moe on the East Coast, and their sound engineer Catja LaFollette in Canada. The show was attended by a capacity crowd dressed in their night life finest. A striking redhead named Nethermind Bliss whirled alone for awhile on the dance floor, but was quickly joined there by some dozen jazz enthusiasts, including a green-eyed panther in a tuxedo.

MOE, FEW AND THEIR CONTINENTAL JAZZ COMBO

This kind of event happens regularly in Second Life but like the early web browsers it’s just scratching the surface of what people will ultimately do with Croquet.