Today at work we finally opened Club Mannequin ...
This is the "nightclub" for Chicago's "One Of A Kind" boutique where we'll be hosting weekly fashion shows, and having hundreds of designer "urban and club" clothes re-created for Second Life. This afternoon, with no advertising or much of any promotion in-world, at our "soft" opening (the "Grand Opening" is next Saturday with the first runway show), we managed to crash the SL server! While this is not ultimately a "good thing" (it's indicating that we may have to convince the client to buy another island and put the club on the border so that we could double the capacity), it is pretty amazing to be able to get that many people showing up! I've had to re-write pretty much all the copy on the web site (http://SLmannequin.com) twice this week because the focus of various bits keep changing (aside from the club, there are "showrooms" for the participating designers in the build where the "virtual" versions of their clothes will be sold, plus on the website there is both an auction for the one-of-a-kind "prototype" pieces and a store to order "production" units of the clothes).
One real cool thing that we're working on is going to be a "window between worlds" for the club and store, with a screen in Club Mannequin that will have a live video feed out the window of the One Of A Kind store (which is right by a very busy El stop north of Wrigley Field), and video screens in the window of the store that will have a computer feed from an Avatar (pretty much just acting as a camera) in the club so that folks wandering by can see into Second Life. We're hoping to have microphones and speakers on both ends as well, so that folks coming by the store can actually talk to the Avatars in the Club, and vice-versa! How freaky is that?
Plus, aside from the "real world" designers whose clothes we're having copied in-world, we're also going to have design contests for S.L. clothing designers, the winners getting their SL designs produced as real-world clothes under the store's label! This all is a HUGE amount of work, but it's breaking a lot of new ground on virtual-to-real interface!
Anyway, that's a lot of what I've been up to this week. I have another book review to knock down and will have another pending in a day or so. By the way, I made my "yearly target" of 72 non-fiction books read in November, so all the stuff I read this month is gravy ... this gives me the luxury of being able to launch into one of those 800-page monsters I've been putting off for years, which I'll be starting on my morning commute on Monday.