Second Life in Yugma

So I thought I’d test out Yugma, the web-based conferencing software I mentioned the other week. What started off as a fairly standard web-conferencing trial turned out rather more fun, with voodoo-like possession of someone else’s Second Life avatar…

It was fairly simple to start up and create a new session – though the Java application took a few moments to download and startup it wasn’t too terrible. When you create a session, it is given a 9 digit code (visible at the top of the control panel) which other users can enter when they click to join a session. I tried joining from the student machines in the lab – but security settings prevented the Java application from running.

So I asked my friend Gia (based down in Essex) if she could try joining the session – which she did. With desktop sharing she was able to see my computer desktop – so when I opened a pdf file she saw that too. It’s even possible to start an annotation tool to ‘draw’ on the desktop or highlight contents of a document. File sharing is also possible. Very neat and very easy to use – though the connection seemed to ’stutter’ at times. That may have been a local issue – Gia said it was very smooth at her end.

Then I thought I’d test things out with Gia as presenter, and this is where life got more fun.

The switchover took a few seconds, after which I was treated to a new window opening with a view of Gia’s desktop (only the Yugma control panel and chat windows are omitted from this) – and I could see that Gia was running Second Life at the time.

Yugma (like other desktop conferencing tools) is not designed for sharing 3D real-time content, so the frame rate for this is very slow, but it did seem to work. Then I had a notion…

I asked Gia to click on her Yugma control panel to share control of her desktop with me (this feature is intended for the likes of Helpdesk support or online tutoring). Then I moved the mouse over the chat window in Second Life… and typed “wow”, which her avatar duly said. This was followed, naturally, by a playing around controlling her avatar using the keyboard and onscreen movement controls. Unnaturally good fun!

We played around for a while with this – good fun but quite freaky. I was very impressed at how well things ran – only left wishing I’d tested out the ‘record’ feature at the same time.

As noted the frame rate is slow, but using Yugma I can see how it would be possible to do remote tutorials with Second Life helping confused users with the basics of the user-interface.

Neat stuff.