 Great American Networks Conferencing opens Orientation and Conference centers Saturday 19 May 2007
By Farqot Gustafson, Reporter
SLReports.Net
Updated: 16 May 2007 4:45 p.m. SLT
As SecondLife evolves beyond its virtual Las Vegas environment—and reputation—more companies are establishing a presence here. Consumer retails such as Circuit City and Sears, as well as IT heavy hitter’s Cisco, Dell, IBM and Microsoft, have created showrooms for their products, and many more are on the way. And why not—with 30–40,000 potential in-world customers at any moment, it’s a logical, albeit passive way of making your presence known.
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So what’s the next step? How about bringing your employees or even customer’s in-world, for orientation sessions, conferences and product demonstrations?
I had a chance to spend some time this week with SecondLife avatar Pierce Benelli, V.P. of Sales & Marketing for Great America Networks Conferencing (GANC), at their orientation and conference centers. GANC is a Chicago-based RL video conference provider, which offers audio, video and Internet conferencing and services.
We began our tour at the Tutorial Center, located on GANC 1. Developed by Anarchy in the UK, Ltd., the island at first reminded me of a cleaned version of SecondLife’s Orientation and Help islands (I half expected to see a newbie tooling around on a Segway). What I found was neatly laid out city plaza, leading to a series of projection screens, and a sandbox to practice in.
Pierce showed me several of the tutorials, which explained the basics of SecondLife, better than SecondLife does, frankly. As an RL trainer and technical writer, I was very impressed with how GANC will introduce newbie’s to the fundamentals of SecondLife.
From there, we flew to the dock and teleported to the conference center on GANC 2. We landed in the Main Square. Laid out to resemble Granada in southern Spain, the square area includes a modern open air café, a market area of old stone buildings, and the conference center itself. Designed to imitate Granada’s 14th century Moorish Alhambra Palace, the conference center is one of the most visually stunning sites I’ve seen in SecondLife. The variety of textures, use of color and low prim count make for a memorable experience.
I saw two conference areas. Conference suite 1 (located in what looked like a small castle, with design elements from a mosque, temple and church) was primarily a large room, with tables seating 8-10 people. This setup allows for small, intimate discussions, and should work well with smaller group audio sessions.
The second, in the Alhambra Palace, was a large round chamber, with a projection screen for a ceiling (thank planetarium in layout, only much larger). The participants are seated in the round, facing a speaker’s stand. Here participants can have streaming audio and video presentations, including 3-D mockups, as well as MS PowerPoint presentations.
According to Pierce, groups of up to 50 can be set up between the two facilities. Although they can seat more than that, the limitations of SecondLife itself slows everything down way too much for that to work. And due to those limitations, the quality won’t match that of the holographic projections of a Star Wars Jedi Council meeting, but Pierce see’s that improving over time as well.
The rest of the island is a visual treat to explore as well. The market area allows visitors to pickup clothing to customize their avatars, and even some building materials to work with in a second sandbox. The rest of the village has a variety of buildings to explore, and there are plenty of paths to walk, and even an old sailing ship to explore. Hopefully, conference participants will get the chance to do so; I know I’d loved to have entered SecondLife here!
Having sat through all too many jumpy RL video conferences over the last 10+ years myself, I can appreciate what GANC is doing here. In a little over a decade since the public was really allowed access to the Internet, we’ve seen great changes in it, and how it is being utilized by both individuals and businesses. GANC is one of those businesses who are pushing out the frontiers, and are doing so in an exciting way within SecondLife.
My thanks to Pierce Benelli for his time on the tour, as well as Atalar Longstaff (GANC President) and Astryd James (GANC V.P. of Client Relations) for their time answering my questions, and showing me around.
For more information, look at either GANC website (www.ganconferencing.com or www.slconferencing.com).
Pierce can reached at pierce.benelli@gmail.com. |
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heh, great article!