Transumanar

Voice in Second Life

The Second Life Voice Viewer is Live! Voice is now part of the main Second Life Viewer. I have participated in Second Life voice tests since the very beginning, first with the Vivox external service (in 2006 we organized the first events with live Vivox voice chat in Second Life with the collaboration of Vivox staff), then in the closed beta, and finally in the open beta (First Look viewer with voice). Now the voice subsystem, based on Vivox technology, has been integrated in the standard Second Life client. I can testify that there has been a huge improvement since the first voice beta releases and now the voice subsystem is solid and user-friendly.

Those who do not wish to use the voice option can, of course, disable it and continue to communicate by text chat. I think I will use a mix of voice and text chat like I do on Skype.

I welcome this development and think it will help unleashing the full potential of Second Life as a communication platform. I am mainly interested in non-gaming applications of Second Life, in particular distance learning, conferences, events and collaborative workspaces, for which voice is definitely a plus. Using a recent but popular terminology, I am an augmentist rather than an immersionist - I am not interested in a parallel “Second Life”, but I am very interested in enhancing (augmenting) my “Real Life” (RL) and think being able to attend a remote meeting or event without traveling is definitely a powerful enhancement. This point of view is shared by most business and educational users of Second Life.

We have enabled voice on all metafuturing sims. Of course, this does not mean that everyone will have to use voice. On the contrary, those who prefer to use text chat will be more than welcome and I am sure most other users will adapt to their preferred communication channel.

Understandably, there are some users of Second Life who, for many reasons, prefer not to use voice. Most of them are primarily interested in Second Life as a role playing game (I am not going to expand on that because I believe the reasons why they do not want to use voice are their own business). Some of them feel that the integration of voice in Second Life will gradually lead to discrimination against them. This is, I think, true in a certain sense: role players will tend to congregate in “role playing sims” where voice is disabled, and I am sure there will be plenty of sim owners who will choose to disable voice and cater to role players. At the same time, role players will certainly miss much of the educational and business action.

I fully understand the frustration of role-players who, in a certain sense, see their magic carpet pulled from under their feet. At the same time, I have always been in favor of voice because I am persuaded that having more options to freely choose is always a good thing, and that removing options because some people prefer not to use them is not acceptable. In other words, live and let live. This principle goes, of course, much beyond Second Life. Live your life as you wish to live it, as long as you don’t do concrete harm to others, and let others free to live their life as they wish as long as they don’t do concrete harm to anyone. I am stressing the word “concrete” to explicitly exclude “moral harm”. Those who do not like the lifestyle of others for abstract “moral” reasons unrelated to any concrete and factual damage should, simply, look the other way.

Posted by G.P. on 08/03 at 06:20 AM
English • News • (9) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink • Print