Now, all the buzz in SL is about the voice – lets forget the absolute and maddening instability of the whole thing – and we have two opinions.
One is like that of terrystorch, which is all excited, communicated that this a great thing, really cool, and really missed up until now – and yes, I can agree with it, really great and cool thing.
And the other is that it is that though it is really exciting, it’s not the most useful feature. And that is my opinion, too.
Why is that so?
The proponents argue that so far typing made communication a bit slow, awkward and detracted from the experience of full immersion, and now, with full voice support it will be more real, faster, quicker, and easier.
Yes, it probably will be, but…
There are a lot of SL players at the moment, now consistently about 30 thousand people online at the same time.
What people tend to forget, that a lot of these people are not native english speakers.Why is that important?
If I have voice, and want to “match the speed”, I will talk in my native. That means I am not using english.
Now, just imagine the nex scene with voice:
A club, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, GreenDay, whatever playing in the background.
Twenty peope standing in the room, using voice chat. Ten of the twenty speaks english of different “types” – irish, scottish, new zealander, australian, texan, new yorkian, whatver. Five people speaks french, 2 danish and 3 speaks italian.
Now immerse yourself into the scene. Do you hear the music? Good… and now…. welcome to Babel.
That is my problem. Not to mention that even if all of them were talking in english, all of them would have a hard timeunderstanding the others, and the conversation would be full of “excuse me, could you repeat it please?”.
Including voice will cut the people into two groups: one that uses voice, and one that uses the message box. The two threads of conversation will not connect – almost noone will use the two simultaneously – and then the group of voice users will be cut into sub-groups, those who speak english well enough – or are brave, confident enough – to converse in it fluently, and the small groups who will talk in their natives.
No, I don’t think it will really work. I may be wrong, but I think the voice in SL will not be what people expect it to be.
Secondlife and voice
In April I wrote about how the hype is on voice-integration into Secondlife.
It happened, and it was not a big surprise for me. The reasons are many, but as it turned out, it was not a big hit. I am yet to find a place where people use voice publicl…