Home made Virtual Soup (2017)
Image by: Master Billy Auster
Homemade Virtual-Soup is a project in which real students from UC Santa-Cruz meet weekly for lunch with virtual-students from a school on Second-Life. The virtual-students are adults who roleplay kids who attend an in-game school on a daily basis for the last few years. Their routine includes a variety of activities but at the end of each day they eat a virtual-soup together. Bringing two different communities of students to the same table opens up an obstructed passage and connects between levels of reality that are usually kept apart. The meeting is designed to seem as if tables are really joined. The real and the virtual tables are designed to look the same, having similar tablecloths and placemats. The food is also similar and includes soup and bread. A live video stream of each world is projected to the other world so that a conversation between students takes place in real time.
