CSI:NY in Second Life - preview of the future of TV
The CSI:NY show featuring Second Life and the CSI:NY Virtual Experience in Second Life have been among the most talked metaverse news of 2007. From the NY Times: The lead detective on the hit CBS series “CSI: NY,” Mac Taylor, is a pretty conventional television hero: like his colleagues on the two other “CSI” franchises, he uses science to follow the evidence and catch the bad guys. But in the episode for Oct. 24, Taylor, played by Gary Sinise, finds himself entering the computer-based virtual world known as Second Life.
Gwyneth Llewelyn’s Don’t miss the CSI:NY “Down the Rabbit Hole” featuring Second Life! has very interesting comments and some advice for those who have missed the episode on TV. The plot is fast-paced, clean and simple as in most CSI episodes: the good guys hunt, stalk, find and catch the bad guys, this time not only in the real world but also in the metaverse. A killer has taken control of the popular Second Life avatar “Venus” - a popular fictional character, “the Paris Hilton of Second Life” - by torturing her previous owner to get the password and killing her, and uses Venus’ avatar to contact new victims in Second Life. In the image below, Taylor talks to the avatar of the killer in Second Life.
The killer copies the look of her stolen avatar when she goes out to kill in real life (image below). Who is the killer? We don’t know yet. At the end of the episode of October 24 we don’t know yet who is the killer - (s)he (?) managed to escape in both RL and SL - and will have to wait for another episode in 2008 to find out.
In the meantime we can participate in the hunt for the killer in Second Life. On the website of the CSI:NY Virtual Experience we can sign up for the Finding Venus game: “On October 24, Detective Mac Taylor chased a murderer, Venus, into Second Life. She’s on the loose, and her virtual body count is rising. Track her down before she kills again!”. I have only visited the CSI:NY Virtual Experience in Second Life as a virtual tourist and not really played the game, but I am sure that the creators must have disseminated the virtual world with valuable hints that will permit the more astute players to find Venus in both realities. For example: “We’ve put a trace for Venus on every camera in the city. We’ve received our first image! Head to the Venus crime lab to study the photo in the lab, and then go out into the field and try to find where the photo was taken”.
The CSI:NY Virtual Experience in Second Life is a recreation of some typical New York city blocks over a few SL sims. When I visited there were about 50 avatars exploring the sims and participating in the Venus hunt. Many avatars were in the orientation and welcome area: the CSI:NY Virtual Experience is geared mainly at newcomers. In fact, it is expected that one million new players will come to Second Life from the huge CSI audience over the next few weeks. Expert SL users tend to forget that the SL learning curve may be too steep for casual players who don’t live and breathe computer systems like we do. The Electric Sheep Company, creators of CSI:NY Virtual Experience in Second Life, have taken this into account by designing ergonomic and easy to navigate sims, and even developing a special and more ergonomic CSI-themed SL viewer ("OnRez") for new users. From the website: “For the BEST Virtual CSI: NY experience, make sure you have the OnRez Second Life viewer”. The SL pictures in this article have been taken with the OnRez viewer.
This is a very interesting initiative and one of the first examples of mature use of virtual worlds by the entertainment industry. It will bring many new users to Second Life and increase the media visibility of the show and its sponsor Cisco Systems. I think an interesting twist would be filming some of the SL scenes for the second episode in the actual CSI:NY Virtual Experience in Second Life, to give fans the option of seeing their own SL avatar in the TV show. I am sure this is the beginning of an interesting trend to mix and merge TV and film entertainment with virtual worlds. But it is still a first weak coupling between TV/film and the metaverse - I am sure the evolution of the TV/film industry will see a much stronger coupling with virtual worlds.
The CSI:NY Virtual Experience in Second Life is “only” a companion to the TV show. But with the evolution of online VR technology, at some point virtual worlds will BE the show. From the comfort of our 2017 living room, perhaps watching a big screen like in the CSI:NY image below but probably also using highly immersive VR gear (glasses, gloves etc.), we will experience shows by walking around in high fidelity 3D VR worlds with high fidelity avatars of the actors reproduced in VR through motion tracking and capturing technology. We will be able to go back and watch a scene from a closer distance or from another point of view. And it will be interactive, perhaps with the possibility to activate a fork in the plot like in a role playing game, but certainly with the possibility to interact with the in-world advertisements.
Then, with brain interfacing technology and full sensorial stimulation, we will be able to BE in the show. This has been long foreseen by science fiction writers like Greg Bear in Slant ("Performers commit pornography of the soul, sharing their sexual and emotional experience with an audience of millions through a direct neural link, the Yox") and Neal Stephenson in The Diamond Age ("A term (short for “interactive") used by Neal Stephenson to describe a form of elite interactive entertainment, in which a live human performer (a “‘ractor") working from a computer-provided script, improvises in real-time with paying customers, over a virtual reality network"). It will slowly but steadily become reality in the next one or two decades.
Posted by G.P. on 11/05 at 06:41 PM