Day: November 6, 2020

Melatopia: the U.K.’s Biggest South Asian Festival Comes to Sansar on November 7th and 8th, 2020

The lineup of performers at Melatopia in Sansar

The 18th edition of London Mela, the U.K. festival of South Asian culture, will be held in a virtual-reality venue created by the same team that brought you the successful Lost Horizon Festival this past July.

As with Lost Horizon, which was seen by four million people in 100 countries, Melatopia viewers will be able to experience live artists, DJs and dance performances in a virtual world created especially for the event, and on a range of platforms, including mobile devices, desktop computers and VR headsets.

There are three main ways to take part in the Melatopia experience:

​1. Sign up for a Twitch TV account and get ready to experience all the incredible Melatopia festival performers. Here’s the channel.

​2. Follow the Melatopia festival on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube and stream the whole event there! You could even start a watch party!

​3. If you own a Windows PC, you can download the Sansar client software and experience our virtual reality Mela. Create an avatar and join in the festivities! You can experience Sansar on your computer desktop or in your virtual reality headset (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, or Valve Index). You can download Sansar from their website, or from Steam. Here’s a somewhat outdated but still useful step-by-step guide for getting started in Sansar for newbies.

Click here to get your free tickets to the event, and check the official Melatopia website for concert details, performer lineups, and news. (Please note all times on the website are given in London, Greenwich Mean Time/GMT, so be sure to convert to your local time zone!)

The official press release follows. See you there!


Event: Melatopia

Dates: Saturday 07 & Sunday 08 November 2020

Times: 15:00 – 03:00 (3PM to 3AM) GMT

Venue: www.londonmela.org the gateway to MELATOPIA within Sansar the global VR leader in live events

Melatopia streams live on Twitch, Facebook, and YouTube

The 18th edition of South Asian culture-fest, London Mela will be held online and virtually for the first time ever on 7-8 November 2020. Founders Ajay Chhabra and Julian Rudd reinvent the much-loved festival as a digital and virtual reality event; Melatopia, featuring South Asian music, dance, food, and culture for a one-of-a-kind festival experience within an immersive VR experience in Sansar.

Usually performed at the festival’s home in Southall Park, London Mela organisers have embraced the digital realm with the first Virtual Reality Mela ever staged, to keep everyone safe during COVID 19.

The award-winning event’s partners Nutkhut, Mela Partnership and Remarkable Productions join forces with Shangri-La’s Lost Horizon Festival to create a new online virtual reality venue, MELATOPIA, which is built using Sansar, Wookey Technologies’cutting-edge, photorealistic platform for virtual live events and can be experienced on PC, VR or mobile (iOS), plus will be streamed live on Twitch and across social media.

Audiences will be able to experience live artists, dance performances and DJs in an extraordinary VR online space specially created for the Mela. Whether viewed on a smartphone, tablet, laptop or wearing VR glasses, audiences will be able to engage with the performances and each other in new and innovative ways. Viewers are encouraged to book 7/8 November out in their diaries and invite friends and family to an online watch party. COVID 19 has stopped audiences visiting the Mela in London, so the London Mela will come to them wherever they are in our great city and wherever they are in the world.

The London Mela is best known for its adventurous programming and genre-crossing collaborations from an incredible mix of household names and contemporary artists. This year will be no different with US/Indian rapper The Raja Kumari headlining the show. In support we have an incredible collaboration between Juggy D and Pandit Ram Sahai Sangeet Vidhyalaya (PRSSV), 5 Tabla players from Singh Sabha Southall Education Centre in Southall.

Pop sensation and BBC Future Music Artist Celina Sharma features as well as Roma Sagar and Rio Jai. Panjabi Hit Squad promise to get the audience jumping around their front rooms with a barnstorming set. No Mela is complete without qawwali and the Mela is proud to present Chand Ali Khan, one of the UK’s most exciting qawwali talents, complete with 7-piece live band. Rounding of this first announcement, London Mela presents the legendary Panjabi MC, producer of the seminal Mundian To Bach Ke, possibly the greatest crossover dance tune from the South Asian diaspora.

All artists featured in Melatopia will be recorded exclusively for the event.

London Mela (source)

Editorial: Second Life Founder and High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale Comments on the Facebookening of Oculus

Have you joined the RyanSchultz.com Discord yet? You’re invited to be a part of the first ever cross-worlds discussion group, with over 460 people participating from every single social VR platform and virtual world! More details here. 

Erica joy Baker, Director of Engineering at GitHub, recently tweeted her dismay at discovering that, upon deactivating her Facebook account, her Oculus Quest became unusable:

I deactivated my Facebook, as I often do. It made my Oculus Quest 100% unusable. Not “hard to use” or “unpleasant to use.” Unusable.

She added:

My Oculus Quest didn’t degrade gracefully after I deactivated my Facebook account. Instead, the home app went into an ANR loop. When the Quest came back up after I hard rebooted it, the home app loaded, but blocked me using anything until it could connect to my Facebook account again.

Second Life founder and High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale commented on her tweet:

So true and so sad. I can’t believe VR tech (which is getting better) is dominated by one company whose track record clearly suggests they will cause harm to those who would use these devices. What a bad situation.

And I replied:

This is why we need to promote and support open source social VR solutions such as Tivoli Cloud VR and Vircadia (based on your HiFi code). Thank you for your part in building that universe of possibility, Philip.

And it’s true; Philip Rosedale’s decision to make the original High Fidelity social VR platform software code available for other developers to build upon has already led to two separate, distributed open-source successors to HiFi, both of which I have written about before on this blog: Tivoli Cloud VR and Vircadia (which I would strongly encourage you to check out, if you haven’t already done so). I have recently had a guided tour of both platforms, and both look very promising!

And, of course, there are numerous examples of other, non-Facebook social VR platforms which people should explore (NeosVR, Sansar, and Sinespace* are three I highly recommend you try).

Facebook already has too much power and control over the current and future development of social virtual reality, unnecessarily forcing users of its Oculus VR devices to create accounts on its Facebook social network (so that their personal data can be further strip-mined and sold to corporations and campaigns for profit).

We need to actively promote and support metaverse alternatives to the Facebook ecosystem, which do NOT track our every click, like, relationship, glance, and gesture.

*Full disclosure: I am an embedded reporter for Sinespace, writing sponsored blogposts about the people, news and events on that virtual world/social VR platform.

Why I Love Anderson Cooper

(Yes, I know, totally off-topic..my blog, my rules.)

I have always loved CNN news anchor (and my future husband*) Anderson Cooper, that sexy, silver-haired fox who weighs in here on Donald Trump’s dubious claims that he has been cheated out of re-election:

*He just doesn’t know it yet.