There's something magical about live events. The rush of pleasure of a complex set of tasks succeeding in real time. The scrambling to solve problems. The gut-wrenching horror if there's an insurmountable problem. It all adds up to a tremendous thrill when things work perfectly. This story is not about things working perfectly.

VastPark was happy to be asked to participate in this week's annual ACCAN National Conference dinner event by providing a virtual world environment and animated avatars for the four speakers. The event featured two senior politicians, Senator Stephen Conroy and Malcolm Turnbull MP, the inimitable Genevieve Bell, anthropologist, Director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research and supremely knowledgeable on the effects of gadgets on people's lives all over the planet and, finally, Mandy Salomon, virtual world academic, former stand-up comedian and MC for the event.

One of the challenges was that the event was occurring in Sydney, but our avatar puppeteers were in Melbourne (around 800 Kilometers away). Everyone knew that with such a limited setup time prior to the event, any Internet problems could bring our virtual world show to a halt, so there were prayers spoken and sacrifices offered to the god the Internets prior to the event. Perhaps it helped, in part.

Set up occurred on the day of the event as the ACCAN team didn't have access prior. Issue one: The VastPark world server running on the ACCAN team's laptop could not work inside the venue as the venue's IT department had failed to open the necessary ports despite assurances. No problem. Fall back plan: we used one of our US servers. Now the distance between Melbourne and Sydney grew to include a round trip to Washington, DC. Tested this option. Working well!

With technical issues solved, we ran a rehearsal where the sound was handled by Skype and everyone joined in the one Skype call. Skype was a critical part of the plan. All the speakers could be heard via Skype and the avatars could automatically lipsync to the speakers. It worked. In Sydney, the live virtual world was projecting onto the large monitors in the event hall. All was in readiness.

Show time arrived: People joined Skype call but not everyone could hear each other. The Sydney team valiantly tried several solutions to get everyone on the same call even as the event commenced, but no dice. Mandy completed her speech and was introducing Genevieve as the main speaker and still no-one in Sydney could hear Genevieve, so the Skype conference call was dropped. The Sydney team succeeded in getting Genevieve on the line and then the Sydney audience could hear her brilliantly. That left the Melbourne avatar puppeteers with no sound and no knowledge of what was occurring or who was speaking. The next few minutes were tense, but then the teams settled, coordinated via text chat and treated people to the most out-of-sync avatar acting experience of their viewing lives.

I wouldn't have guessed it, but it turns out that avatars pantomiming wildly out of synch can be very funny - at least to a Sydney audience who considered it the height of comedy. Christopher Zinn from Choice quipped "Wow, that made the Thunderbirds look like Lawrence Olivier!"

Malcolm Turnbull, Genevieve Bell and Mandy Salomon

Thanks to everyone for keeping their cool and soldiering on when lesser mortals would have panicked.

The following clips should prove what a feat it would be for the Thunderbirds to match the acting of "Larry".