Streaming Second Life to a 3g phone - Vollee
This video has just surfaced from Vollee showing the SL experience on a 3g Phone. This service is one that instead of trying to make the phone do all the work it renders the client remotely and streams it to you as video which you then interact with remotely. This same principle was the one that was used to show ActiveWorlds on the phone at the VW 2008 conference the other week. It also is the same principle that the PS3/PSP use to interact across wireless networks anywhere in the world. Where your PS3 acts as a rendering server for the PSP client to view photos, videos and play some older emulated games.
April 22nd, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Interesting! The one important class of interaction that they didn’t show is clicking / rightclicking on stuff. I assume their current implementation doesn’t support it; is it an architectural limitation, or did they just not get to it yet? Hard to imagine actually using SL without the ability to look at people’s profiles, buy things, touch active objects, etc…
April 22nd, 2008 at 3:55 pm
I am not sure to what level the overlay can or will work. I can imagine that it is possible to control the mouse directly on a headless client of this nature. Its early days, but as a design pattern it makes sense.
In fact we trialled this approach at Wimbledon in a 5 minute POC as we were streaming video of SL.
I watched it using my phone but used a different back channel. In this case a person on the other end controlling the SL responding to directions :-). Its a slightly people intensive approach but asking someone to direct around allows the full interface at the other end to be exploited, whilst delivering to someone who is on a restricted platform via video. Its a bit wetware grid really, but I am sure it will evolve.
April 29th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
I’m trying to get my head around how this was accomplished. Was it literally video that was streamed to the phone, or something more akin to using a VNC server/client?
April 29th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
its video streamed to the client, but the client side interactions are sent back to the intermediate client. Remote rendering is an option now. In a way thats how interactive tv works already. You tv does not really render anything but you have a backchannel to send requests.