Staging Second Life in Real and Virtual Spaces - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 223

Second Life environment, the students rehearsed
short scenes that were shown as a workshop-in-
progress to an audience of University staff and
students. The students were directed by their
course coordinator, Russell Fewster and visiting
director, Joff Chafer from Coventry University,
assisted by lighting designer, Nic Mollison and
computer programmer, Kyal Tripodi.
Students spent their first class in a computer
laboratory creating their own avatars. For most
this was their first experience with Second Life .
The subsequent sight of twenty student-created
avatars of varying shapes, sizes, colours and
genders hanging suspended in the sky together
over the University Island was like witnessing
the spawning of a tribe. Attempts were made to
co-ordinate the group to do a series of actions
together with varying success; first positioning
the group together as a starting point and secondly
simple gestures such as bowing, clapping, blow-
ing a kiss became realisable. More complicated
movements like flying together were problematic
as it was too difficult to keep the group together.
The notion of how Second Life gestures might
translate theatrically offered a way to transpose the

virtual into real life; indeed feedback from students
and the programmer highlighted the 'clunkiness'
of Second Life i.e., the time lag between typing
and responses, and the robot like stiffness of the
gestures. In turn, the coordinator encouraged the
students to consider how they might stage this
'clunkiness' and to play with and enjoy transposing
such Second Life clichés theatrically.

Set-Up of the Theatre

The set-up of the theatre (Figure 3) was designed
to create the illusion that avatar actors and live
performers were interacting in the same shared
space. To achieve this illusion the Second Life
world was projected onto a large scrim positioned
at the front of the stage and the student performers
located behind the scrim on the stage were lit ap-
propriately to appear as if they were in the same
space as Second Life . The stage lighting was set
low to avoid washing out the projected image and
to balance the illumination of the live actor with
the projected image.
Two computers located in the auditorium were
used to control the camera and projection unit,

Figure 3. Set-up of the theatre showing scrim in front of actors on stage and lighting stage design and
image by Nic Mollison