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Second Life & Voice - It Will Happen!

Tue, 02/27/2007 - 15:16 — Brett Bixler

This was just announced - SL will have voice chat integrated by June, 2007! Yeah! Read more here.

I've been experimenting with Second Talk,  a neat way to use Skype while in SL. You find a Second Talk Kiosk (one is one Menagerie Island) and get a  free headset for your avatar to wear. Then, providing you have a free Skype account and have Skype installed on your computer, when you activate Second Talk, it will launch Skype for you and connect to others nearby.

It's not too difficult to use, but it does rely on "outside" technologies to accomplish audio chat, so it's not tied to the world of SL. For example, if I'm chatting with someone virtually near to me and I teleport far away, I'm still able to talk to them. Is this good or bad? Probably depends  on what you want to do. The point is, it kinda breaks the other inworld conventions (sight distance is limited, ability to see text chat is limited to 20 meters, 100 meters if someone is shouting, etc.).

For educators, adding audio for chat directly into SL will open up some truly excellent possibilities.

Comments

Wed, 02/28/2007 - 07:42 — Alexander Hayes (not verified)

Considering that I've mostly

Considering that I've mostly experienced of SL wandering around in empty city's or jumping of cliffs and getting stuck in the code glitch of a ditch I'll be interested to see whether we can achieve commercially what's available for the military otherwise.

Audio would be a bonus and getting rid of the keyboard charades would be ideal.

Will it add more load to my already burnt out core point zero laptop ? Will I better connect with those otherwise disconnected ? Will it make it through my organisations firewall ?

Time will tell.

Wed, 02/28/2007 - 17:34 — OLDaily[中文版] » Blog Archive » 2007å¹´2月2 (not verified)

[...] Second

[...] Second LIfe无法处理超过38,000人的同时在线，也不能强制性的在最大负荷时把免费用户撵出游戏，但是它们打算从07年的6月份开始启用综合语音聊天服务？你知道，这不禁让我想起当年美国在线的战略－－广告业务疯长，可这是一项他们无法支撑的业务，于是只有调头并使用大量做广告的钱去购买一项现实生意，也就是时代华纳。同时，有一个竞争的虚拟世界网站, Outback Online浮出了水面。当然了，接下来会发生的状况，正是发生在社会化网站的情况是一样的（有那么多其他的服务在竞争，这就像工商业界里再三出现重犯同一种错误的案例一样），每一个包含有整套3D虚拟世界的游戏都试图吸引一部分市场份额。这种状况将会持续好几年，最终，一股开源势力，或许称之为Open3D什么的，将创造出一个单一身份识别的分布式版本。 Brett Bixler, Penn State Virtual Worlds [链接] [评论] [...]