Voice comes to Second Life

"Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you!"

by Surfdaddy Orca

Surfdaddy Orca is Editor-in-Chief of The Seventh Sun and an avid SL surfer. He did the initial site map for the Diegoland sim and enjoys building and scripting.	The Voice First Look Viewer is now available on the live grid. It is in sync with the normal viewer and appears to be quite stable. Click here to download.

The words “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you!” were first uttered into a telephone in Boston, Massachusetts on March 10, 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant Thomas Watson.

The phone was made of a wooden stand, a funnel, a cup of acid, and copper wire, which transmitted his voice to Mr. Watson listening in on a receiver in another room.

Move forward in time 131 years to 2007. The place is the surreal beta test grid of Second Life (SL) littered with experimental sculpties (sculpted prims) and wild-looking objects of all shapes and sizes. I’ve got my new headphones (with microphone) and I’m flying around looking for avatars with white dots over their heads. The white dot indicates that an avatar has Voice chat enabled in Preferences.

“Testing, one, two... can you hear me?” I say as green waves radiate from my white dot. The green waves fluxuate based on the volume of my headphones, my voice, and the proximity of my camera. Suddenly I happen upon a camp of furries huddled around a fire and hear the distinctive “Aaa, shove it..” of an East Coast Bronx-American accent.

Or maybe it was Jersey... I’m a West Coast guy, after all.

Well, not quite the stuff of history. But, I can more clearly imagine how Alexander Graham Bell must have felt on that March day so long ago. It was really exciting to hear and be heard in SL after months and months of just simple text chat and IM.

Voice provides a new level of possibilities for conferences, overall communication, and collaboration in SL. Unlike services like Skype and WebEx, voice in SL lets you see a person’s avatar speaking (as green waves radiating) and provides a level of personalization and identification that is simply not possible with other services. As Philip (Rosedale) Linden noted during a recent keynote address at Gartner Symposium ITxpo, “There are a lot of problems with telephony when doing conference calls. You can’t tell who’s talking when there’s more than one person. But in the virtual world, voice solves it.” (CNET news.com)

The SL voice interface requires the use of a headset with a microphone, preferably USB, according to Linden Lab recommendations. Headsets start at around $20.00 USD. Once you’ve plugged in your headset and tested it with Windows or Mac OSx (Linux is not supported as of this writing), you need to download the SL Voice First Look client. It will install with a separate icon on your desktop. Make sure to use this new icon when you first log in.

Once you log in, you need to adjust your preferences. On the Edit menu, click Preferences. Click the Voice Chat tab and check the Enable voice chat check box. Then, choose your Input device (microphone) and Output device (speakers) from the drop-down lists.

Once you’ve enabled voice chat, you will need to find land in SL that is similarly voice-enabled. Not all land is set up this way, but your own parcel should be voice-enabled by default. If voice is enabled, there will be headphone icon at the top of the screen.

You should see a white dot over your head. If you don’t see a dot, check the instructions on the SL Wiki.

Once you see a dot, you’re ready to try voice! Find some avatar friends on voice-enabled land and see if you can hear them speak. You will need to press the Talk button at the bottom of your screen in order for you to speak and be heard.

You can see the active speakers in your area (the ones with white dots) in the Active Speakers box. Click the talk bubbles next the Talk button to see active speakers. The box also shows who is currently speaking.

Click the new Communicate button at the bottom of your screen to see your IMs, chat history, groups, and list of friends.

You will also use the Communicate box to view an avatar’s profile or to add a new friend. The box takes up a lot of “screen real estate” (some would say it gets in the way), but it does bring things together.

Don’t imagine for a minute that text chat and IM will go away with voice. After all, not all of us can hear or have radio-quality voices. Recent Wired magazine commentary on World of Warcraft (WoW) by Clive Thompson captures the change to WoW that came with voice, “Games that were governed by text are now being governed by chat, and it is subtly changing the feel of our virtual universe.”

Thompson goes on to point out some of the shortcomings of voice, “...shy or geeky players have long thrived in text-based chat, where their social impediments matter less; but they wither when interaction becomes a cocktail party.”

And, he continues, girls are especially reluctant to use a voice interface because “they get hit on a lot” according to a recent study by Krista-Lee Malone, a student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

Thompson acknowledges, however, that, “...voice chat will eventually allow for some awesome tricks.” In Second Life, such tricks will include hands-free communication on builds. Imagine trying to build a new dock or house for your parcel. With text alone, you would have to stop editing, type into the text box, and wait for your collaborator to respond about this or that texture or shape.

Instead, you can now talk while you show her the options. Such potential for group collaboration on projects with multiple avatars can shorten the development curve and reduce the frustration of interruptions when you’re “in the zone” on a particular build.

Chat and IM also allow multi-tasking (IM’ing a friend during a conference, for example, or starting a text stream in parallel with voice). You can spawn as many multiple conversations at one time as your brain can handle.

So, Mr. Watson, join the party. Voice is another tool in the growing arsenal of tools available to SL residents—not to be avoided if you can hear—even if you feel your voice is not CNN-ready.

Voice adds a level of communication and intimacy that simply isn’t there with chat and IM alone. Some might even say it’s awesome. Philip Linden said during the Gartner Symposium ITxpo that he hopes to see voice officially launched in SL within the next several months.

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