Will Voice Chat Dominate As Virtual Worlds Become More Immersive?

The next episode of BBC Radio 4’s Digital Human sees presenter Aleks Krotoski takes a look  a voice, or rather the lack of voice in online communications :

In this weeks Digital Human Aleks Krotoski asks if the Digital world is robbing us of our voice. When we’d rather text or message than speak to someone are we still listening?

While radio may well be thriving look at just about every other digital device and its pictures , video and text communication that dominates. So what is the future for the voice?

This has potential to be interesting, although this show runs for less than half an hour so they may not be able to squeeze enough in but voice is an issue that has been raised in many a virtual world and has been a bone of contention in Second Life since it was introduced.

So why is voice a second class means of communication online? I haven’t done any research into this but I would hazard a guess that some of the reasons are to do with identity, some of the reasons are to do with language barriers and some of the reasons are to do with the online experience being so visually rich, text simply has more mileage in the tank. However as virtual worlds become more immersive, this may change.

In February 2007 Joe Linden blogged : Bringing Voice to Second Life and over 500 comments appeared below the post, many of them disagreeing with the addition of voice. Some of the comments on that blog post explain why voice isn’t as widely accepted as text :

“The voice ‘improvement’ avoids one obvious issue… In what human language are all the voices to use? English? Chinese? Spanish? Portuguese? It’s bad enough bridging the language barriers when we are IMing (where one has time to think, compose, and apply rules of grammar and remember foreign words over a span of time)… But speaking demands faster recall and faster integration of language elements in real time… tough in one’s own language… sometimes almost impossible in another language… Good luck, but I have my doubts….”

“I suppose this was inevitable, but it will further divide those for whom Second Life is a truly second life, very possibly a fantasy life, from those for whom SL is an extension of their first life. I wonder if there will end up having to be a grid (from LL or someone else) where those who don’t just want another first life will be able to go.”

“Anoynimty has always been one of the main points of SL. Until it can be perserved then their should be no voice like Philip Linden originaly said.”

“But you have to understand the emotions and fear of the other people playing here that don’t want to use voice, either if they can’t speak well or don’t want to show their identity. SL is in my opinion a place used for leisure, fun, relaxation and even psychotherapy.

If you introduce this babylonian tower this will be the first step of isolation by nations. While chatting you still can look up the dictionary or take your time to answer. This is not possible while having a live talk. And don’t forget the dialects. not everybody speaks a clear tongue understandable even for foreigners.”

There are other objections there, people in homes with families where they don’t want to engage in voice chat because others are in the home. Females in particular have complained of being harassed about not using voice and then been accused of not really being females.

Continue reading “Will Voice Chat Dominate As Virtual Worlds Become More Immersive?”

LL Should Be Leading The Conversation

I was having a chat at some ungodly hour of Sunday night with Delicia Whipsnaps Inara Pey about Linden Lab’s lack of shouting from the rooftops about what they’re doing. Examples that sprang to mind were the new privacy controls on parcels that allow you to make yourself invisible to outsiders and outsiders invisible to yourself, numerous bug fixes, Mesh allowing you to halve the number of prims you’re using in terms of prim equivalency (or land impact as it will soon be known) when you link them, 64 x 64 meter prims and how Vanderbilt University School of Nursing have been using Second Life as a training faciltity  which is a really good use case for Second Life and one Linden Lab should be highlighting.

Linden Lab are getting on with a lot of things behind the scenes, a cursory glance at the Server deployment forum shows this week’s release includes:

  • Adding additional metric collection information
  • LSL enhancements to catch and prevent shape changes that would cause a return
  • Support for calculating Resource Weights and Land Impact for all objects
  • Several crash fixes
  • Region/parcel crossing fixes
  • Miscellaneous fixes
  • llCastRay() enabled.

Continue reading “LL Should Be Leading The Conversation”

Pie And Power

I went and took a look at Philip Rosedale’s new venture today, Coffee and Power, and was struck by how good a concept this is. Basically people ask for things to be done, offer some sort of fee for the mission and then await responses. Unfortunately it’s only available right now in San Francisco, where the website tells us all great ideas start but I can recall watching Karl Malden going around the streets of San Francisco as a kid and it didn’t seem like a great idea then!

The thing I like about this site though is that it looks fun, although a lot of the requests are “Bring me a sarnie” at the moment, it has potential. However I’m wondering why this isn’t being implemented in Second Life!

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Talk to us, like Lovers do

Jezebel Bailey has taken up the Relay For Life baton from me, whereas I covered Fantasy Faire 2011, our Jezebel is covering the Relay For Life Home & Garden expo and to that end has already put the spotlight on two of the sponsors, Stonewood Homes & Interiors and Shameless Bits. I thought I’d inform you of this as an example of communication, because communication remains an issue with Linden Lab, most notably the blog, but also information that doesn’t get blogged.

Blog updates have been discussed by Tateru Nino, in a blog post that saw the strange appearance of the ghost of John Howard Galt, who has a strange view on communications to say the least.

Continue reading “Talk to us, like Lovers do”

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