Mick Roach and Chris Meehan with their Second Life version of Liverpool
There is currently about one live concert per week in virtual Liverpool, where a band in a studio "streams" its performance into a bar or club to a live audience. The Wombats are scheduled to play at Barfly, and some 12,000 people have entered a competition to be there when they do.
So how does a night in virtual Liverpool compare with the real thing? No waiting round for people to get ready, queuing for a taxi home, or standing around in heels.
Chris says: "You can get to meet people who are not necessarily people you would meet, and you get exciting entertainment that you don’t have to pay £15 to see, and you might just enjoy it.
"Maybe the atmosphere isn’t as good," acknowledges Chris. "But if you can’t get to the Mathew Street festival, for example, you get some sort of sense of what it’s like."
According to Professor Madjid Merabti, director of the School of Computing and Maths at John Moore’s university, such limitations could soon be a thing of the past.
Images taken from the millions of security and safety cameras and satellites could be employed to make Second Life and gaming a far more realistic experience.
"We have gone from old media and traditional ways of working to blurring between the virtual and the real," he says.
"At the moment, avatars don’t look like people and the streets look computer-generated. But there is no reason why you can’t, from your home, be in the real streets in a virtual way and go on a real-time tour of Liverpool using surveillance cameras police use.
"The challenge is adding emotions to avatars. It’s a way off but you can do some of this. We are looking at the changes of people’s faces that you don’t consciously notice, such as when it is hot."
But such advances come with their own dangers. The sociological impact, says Prof Madjid Merabti could be that people blurred the real with the virtual.
It could already be happening.
A 47-year-old factory worker is currently accused of shooting dead a 22-year-old male colleague in New York – after the former apparently had Second Life romance with a woman who went on to have a cyber-affair with the latter.
"On the internet, people feel emboldened to do more than they would under normal constraints," said Prof Merabti. "You don’t see the consequences of your actions. It’s similar to how people address others when they email.
"In 25 years’ time, the danger is that there is no need to leave your house.
"There’s no need, for example, to go to the pub when you can live in Second Life, and so when you do go out of the house you interact with real people the way you would in the virtual world. Society is built on manners and certain morals, so that could pose a problem."
Space bar and micro chips? Or wine bar and bag of chips? It’s an exciting new world, but on Saturday night, the old one will do.
Touring Second Life Liverpool >>>
