Invited Essay — Future of Work: Musical Performance in Virtual Reality
Today’s guest post continues our theme on the Future of Work in a somewhat different direction: the performing arts and music.
The rise of digital music and music sharing has challenged the existing economics of the music business. And at the same time these very technologies offer artists new ways to connect with fans, customers, and other artists. A shared virtual reality environment presents an entirely new creative means for performing music and sharing music and other art as well as potentially providing a platform for selling or exchanging it.
Linda Rogers has been organizing musical performance in Second Life for half a decade. Linda shares some of the history, issues, and challenges she encountered along the way to five years of virtual reality performances in which she quite arguably and somewhat accidentally invents an entirely new art form — the shared virtual reality musical performance.