Second Life has a long tradition of live in-world music events, although one of the barriers has always been the limits on how many fans can actually enjoy the virtual experience simultaneously. Utherverse is a company that's claiming to have solved these problems (albeit outside Second Life) with plans for Virtual-Vancouver, which it's describing as "the first massively multi-user online music festival".
Wired’s Listening Post blog has an interview with Utherverse CEO Brian Shuster about the event, which is due to take place on May 14-18, alongside a real-world festival in Vancouver. More than 100 bands’ sets will be simulcast in Virtual-Vancouver in ‘near real-time’, and there’s a claimed capacity of 50,000 people.
The technical solution to the capacity issue sounds intriguing:
“The patent-pending technology is specifically geared toward having high-capacity in a single area of the virtual world. Virtual-Vancouver itself is scalable to be able to hold an unlimited number of users, because it is hosted on our server software that allows us simply to add hardware to increase overall world capacity. The trick comes in allowing hundreds or thousands of user avatars to appear in the same region of Virtual-Vancouver—in this case, having thousands of users in a single amphitheater so that they can all enjoy a concert together. It is this problem that we have solved with a system that dynamically spawns new “dimensions” of the amphitheater as needed, to accommodate as many users as necessary. In this way, the amphitheater will never be so crowded that anyone will have trouble enjoying the show, and users can move easily around the physical space, as well as between dimensions, so that they can meet, dance and interact with any of the other concert-goers from around the world.”
It’s a big ask, but if it works, the implications could be big for other music events launching a virtual counterpart.
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