A Futuristic Utopia For Duran Duran
Well, I guess the news broke while I was on jury duty, but the story I mentioned earlier today as well as last Thursday is now official: 80s new wavers Duran Duran are headed to the virtual world of Second Life in what sounds like a big way. According to a press release, the band is having its own “fantasy, luxury island” built out in SL, where they will give live concerts and media appearances “taking place alongside the band’s media, public and live engagements in the real world. . . . The band has appointed London virtual world designers Rivers Run Red to create the five Duran Duran avatars and the band’s bespoke universe. Creative Director Justin Bovington said: ‘This heralds a new era in how branded content is being developed. For the first time a major international band is using a virtual world as a branded, immersive experience. We’re working directly with the band members to ensure fans get the ultimate Duran Duran experience’.” [UPDATE: Read 3pointD’s interview with the band’s Nick Rhodes for more.]
Just what “the ultimate Duran Duran experience” will be remains to be seen, but Bovington is right that virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com (about which more in an upcoming post) are now being used as a new kind of promotional tool, one that combines the social aspects of some Web 2.0 and social networking sites with more traditional marketing tools like live performances and media events. It’s that opportunity to be “present” that the virtual world brings to the picture, and that even spaces like MySpace can’t match. You can become Duran Duran’s friend on MySpace, but you can’t actually hang out with the band there.
Plus, you can’t hang out in what Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes says will be “a fully functional, futuristic utopia, where you can never be quite sure what to expect.” Rhodes definitely sounds excited about SL in the band’s press release, and sounds as if he has some idea of what possible there, rather than simply going along for the marketing ride. “Second Life is the future right now, offering endless possibilities for artists,” Rhodes says. “Our community will be able to help develop the island into a fully functional, futuristic utopia, where you can never be quite sure what to expect. All visitors are welcome! Duran Duran are thrilled to be the first band to become citizens of Second Life and are rehearsing now for our first concert there in the coming months. I think I can safely say that it will be filled with surprises.”
The move is the latest in a raft of such marketing initiatives that have hit the virtual streets in recent months (with more to come — stay tuned). One interesting question they raise is whether virtual worlds are good for much more than socializing and selling things. I’d wager they are, but it may take time for really useful cases to emerge.
Although getting Duran Duran in-world will be useful enough. A first live concert in SL is planned “in a few weeks,” according to the release, which goes on to explain that this won’t be the first time the band is at the forefront of a new technology:
“The Duran Duran virtual world project is just the latest in a series of pioneering uses, by the band, of revolutionary new technologies throughout their real world career, including being the first group to shoot a music video on location [‘Save A Prayer’, ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’, ‘Lonely In Your Nightmare] with director Russell Mulcahy, in 1982; the first band to use live video cameras and videoscreens in their concerts, on their 1984 US tour; the first artists to make a song available for digital download on the web [‘Electric Barbarella’] in 1997; and the first band to produce a pop video made entirely using Macromedia Flash software.”
Feeds
This promises to be exceedingly cool, given proper preparation. I hope they have the good sense to have third parties run their avatars for them. You can have the niftiest stage on the grid, but if your av is standing around looping the same twitch guitar animation for half an hour, you might as well just make an audio stream and be done with it. Maybe that’s a new niche industry for SL: professional avatar puppeteers. An individual with the sole task of moving the avatar and running his/her animations on cue during a performance (when the performers are obviously too busy to do it themselves) would go a long way toward making an SL performance worthwhile.
Of course, someone could go all out and make scripted music box dancers to run through the marks and animations automagically in sync with canned performances, but that would remove what little spontenaity remains in an SL concert. Save that for the Britney Spears concert, may it never arrive.
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Following on the heels of Suzanne Vega’s debut in Second Life, the gents who brought us such timeless classics as Rio, Hungry Like the Wolf and Reflex are getting the virtual treatment, according to a press release and a BBC…
Duran Duran Goes Live in Second Life…
80’s supergroup Duran Duran is entering Second Life in a big way. According to BBC News, they are creating a virtual island where they plan to host live concerts. "Three-dimensional versions of the band members - called Avatars - have…
“You can have the niftiest stage on the grid, but if your av is standing around looping the same twitch guitar animation for half an hour, you might as well just make an audio stream and be done with”
mmm…now that’a an interesting perspective on user expectations and what “live” music should be all about. I think it’s a bit sad if you judge the total worth of an SL live music performance on the constraints imposed on the performsrs by the current visual technology instead of the music. What about the interaction between player and audience that SL allows near real-time two way communication at a level beyond merely streaming to the web? [albiet still fairly narrow?] What about the spontenaity of a performer jamming something on the fly?
Granted a single loop animation can be dull to watch [and I load different ani loop sequences form HUD myself to try and vary this aspect http://thelaundras.com/SL/KomusoWeb/index.html], but I think there is more to a virtual performance than sitting on the floor looking up at the computer monitor/screen with a lighter in your hand staring misty eyed at your dream idols av jerking around at 1fps.
Maybe it also depends on the music style to a large extent, but from my limited experience people are chatting a lot [which is a big part of the social aspect of sl performances], moving their own av around dancing, or maybe just physically jumping around in rl or listening while doing something else and then running back to type something between songs…which is my preferred audience behaviour;-)
That said, I am working on enhancements to my own av hud to allow a little more randomness into the animation aspect while I play…within reason.
You also have to consider the performance limitations imposed by lag, sim av limits, frame rates…and what is feasible to do for a performer who is running sl, media stream encoding and upload, and audio software processing in real time on the same machine…it’s a cpu killer as well as a workflow issue to manage a live performance in sl…so spare a thought for us on the other end trying to do it instead of dismiss us so easily because we don’t emulate a rl performance down to the last nuance.
I’m sure duran duran will come up with some more visual element, as they are in the spectacle performance zone anyway and have the money to do the puppeteering angle [which I’m sure will happen] but for the solo musicians of sl it’s more about the music imo, not the puppet. Sometimes the whole movement that thinks sl must be an exact clone of rl makes me scratch my head…why does it have to be like rl?
I’m starting to wonder if you could be a successful sl musican if you had an ugly av…SL Idol anyone? aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarggggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhh;-)
should be http://thelaundras.com/SL/KomusoWeb/index.html
thanks to Kronos Kirkorian [lip flap machinima creator] for the excellent gig shots.
Oh, man, Komuso… It wasn’t my intention at all to disparage or dismiss live performances in SL! If I came across that way, please chalk it up to verbal clumsiness, and not my true feelings on the matter. From an audio standpoint, the ability of a performer to interact with his audience in real time, via remote, is nothing short of amazing. It’s a huge step in virtual immersion, and I’m holding up my virtual lighter and screaming for more. And if that is done purely by audio, that’s cool. Perhaps I should have said “live, interactive audio stream.” The actual performances are great. I guess I’m just talking about the trappings.
[Brace yourself- the rambling now begins.]
My point was that if the performer is going to adopt a visual aspect for his performance - by placing his av on the stage and saying “this is me” - then there needs to be some thought and effort put into keeping this visual counterpart moving in an engaging fashion and (perhaps) interacting with the audience, as well. Otherwise, it can be a distraction and a detriment to the performance.
Even if you’re really grooving on the music, it’s jarring to look up and see the avatar standing there with her oddly-angled wrist bisecting the neck of her torso-eating guitar, looping through the same slightly spastic animation for the Nth time. We’re in SL, and we’re saddled with human-looking avatars standing on plausible looking stages. (For some values of “plausible.” Flat platforms with performers standing/sitting on them under the influence of gravity, anyway.) That comes with an expectation of RL-emulating behavior. This is true even if the audio component is the primary method of interaction with the audience. If someone can come up with a performance venue and an avatar representation that doesn’t intrinsically emulate RL stage performance in function (and good luck with that- I’m stumped), then perhaps this expectation can be removed. But, for now, we’re left with “eh, it’s SL” and a deliberate act of will to ignore the obvious flaws and limitations. That’s unfortunate.
Maybe it all boils down to “If you’re going to do it, do it well.” If you’re going to display your avatar as part of the act, then every reasonable effort (with “reasonable” defined by the limitations of your equipment and the situation at hand) needs to be made to integrate the avatar with the performance. Sounds like your HUD work is heading that way- sounds slick, anyway.
That being said, I kind of agree with you about the solo performer vs. the spectacle of an 80s hard rock band. Clearly, there is more need for visual performance alongside the music with the latter. It wouldn’t be Duran Duran without the jumping around and head thrashing (unless they’ve changed quite a bit since the last time I heard them). That’s just part of the whole performance, and it’d be fairly lame if it was replaced with stand-around-and-loop. I suppose two different types of musical performances (at least) are going to evolve in SL: the polished, scripted, pre-programmed audio-visual spectacles; and the freeform, less-visually-oriented, more intimate solo acts. There’s room for both. And probably the only real requirements for the latter are to plan ahead, practice the SL performance, make sure your (that’s a general “you,” not you specifically, Komuso) attachments fit properly, and perhaps change your posture to fit the songs. Even that minor effort would go a long way.
I guess if Duran Duran, or anyone else, wanted to throw money at the technical problems, they’d make two islands: an audience island and a stage island. That way, the framerate for the performer avatars/puppets would be tolerably high, and preprogrammed effects could be depended upon. I think that’d be the case- it’s hard to guess what the impact of 90 child agents (onlookers from an adjacent simulator) would have on the stage sim, but clearly it’d be less than the load of 90 avs residing on the same server.
Of course, if we can’t get more than 90 avs (or 100 or 80- whatever the limit is now) in one performance, this isn’t going to work for big names in the long-term, anyway. Maybe LL needs to come up with a performance grid, with a close-packed group of reduced area audience sims (say just big enough for 80 avatars to sit in a well designed seating system- 1024M^2 would be generous), adjoining a larger stage sim. Or, alternately, some kind of topological hocus-pocus adjoining multiple full-sized sims to the same border (the one between audience and stage sims). But that’s pie-in-the-sky. Perhaps that’s a better idea for a rental business when SL goes open source.
And as far as the ugly av is concerned, Frogg Marlowe seems to do pretty well for himself. :)
[…] Increasingly music stars are moving in that space. Suzanne Vega and Duran Duran recently made announcements relating to their entry in the space. The BBC, MTV, and Fox have already held events in virtual spaces. Technical conferences have had virtual world components. Major League Baseball has dipped its toe in the field. Organizing events, preparing the space, publicizing, booking and training speakers are all jobs that require some level of expertise and there are dollars associated with providing that expertise. […]
On May 25 1985 8 of the US Billboard top 10 were by British artists. Duran were there in the guise of the Power Station. To get the whole list, go to
www.daveches.co.uk/80s/