Nigel Paravane

I finally got a new USB headset today and had a chance to experiment with voice in the Second Life beta. It was really quite good. Mitch Wagner has a very nice writeup of it today over in InformationWeek and he was kind enough to mention our conversation (I’m Nigel Paravane in SL).

When I first landed in one of the newbie areas in the beta grid, the voice effect was unnerving, especially because I hadn’t gotten the volume adjusted. It also didn’t help that a lot of the conversation was a bit silly, so I couldn’t test the voice features properly for an extended discussion. Then an IBM colleague joined me and we experimented away from the crowd and in several sims. The results were a bit uneven. In one sim we got cross-chatter and some electronic interference, but in others it was fine and clear. Eventually it sounded pretty great wherever I went.

In the conversation that Mitch mentions, we tested out distance and direction and it worked as advertised. Like many things in SL, you need to give yourself time to get used to new features and make some adjustments. After about an hour, I was past the novelty of it and it was feeling quite natural.

I’m looking forward to this working on the main grid as well as having it get fine tuned for one-to-one conversations, group conversations, and conversations that can be restricted in various ways to specific land parcels. As someone I was chatting with today said, it’s planned so that you could possibly define a parcel for a single room and then conversations in that room would only be heard by people in that room. Very cool.

The tricky part will be that there will also be features that will let you listen in on conversations from a distance, unbeknownst to the speakers. So some education and training will be necessary or there will be some embarrassed avatars out there.