Lately we have had a lot of turmoil in Second Life. Some good, some bad, some better. But most of them controversial, to say the least.
First, they announced age verification. Then they said there was a going to be a ban on gambling (on which they enacted recently). And in between, we have had the introduction of sculpties, voice and there's going to be another one upcoming: Windlight. And more changes are coming, but some of them are behind the scenes, or 'server side' so to say.
At the end of June, we picked 3 of them, which are supposed to be changes for the better. Improving graphics, introducing new features ... but are they really that good? We already did a story on sculpted prims, or sculpties, and now it's time to reflect on the introduction of Voice. Hot or Not? That's the question.
Of course we couldn't do a proper review without trying it ourselves and of course talking to people about what they think of it. It all came to life (and live) when they made a new First Look viewer available and gradually, region by region, made the grid ready for voice. Then, improvements were made to the system and on the second day of August, in the year 2007, they made it available to everyone. With a new viewer, Voice was easily accessible to everyone.
When I installed it, it was just like any other release of a new viewer. The message came up asking to install the new viewer, I pressed the 'oh yes please, free me of those nasty bugs and give me voice' button, and went ahead. Installation went perfectly right, I checked the preferences and turned on Voice. I plugged in my headset, changed the plugs again because I had switched the pink and the green by accident, and thought: where better to test this than on Help Island? Always people around, probably some Mentors to help out, and a good test how Voice works in already laggy circumstances.
To my big surprise, it worked perfectly well. No fiddling around with drivers, no figuring out how it should work, no hassle with volume settings, I could hear other people talking instantly and after a while I felt brave enough to utter my first words. And it was immediately answered by a lady with a Texan accent, saying: "Yes, loud and clear"!
How wonderful. And the lag wasn't any worse than usual. I wondered why everyone was so afraid of that. I mean, Voice was much seen as a real performance threat to SL, possibly making laggy sims even more laggy and causing whole estates to crash. Well, to me it was great.
Recently, I haven't been using Voice a lot, but yesterday I tried it again. Just to see if I wouldn't immediately go to phase 2 of a normal culture shock (dissapointment). I didn't. It still worked okay, except that some of the people were hard to hear, and others were very much so present. But people sorted that out themselves. And the funny thing was: when the Help Island sim crashed (with everyone in it), Voice kept working! Even when all stood still and my mini-map turned red, I could still hear people talking about how they crashed and how they would get back in a second.
As I did. And the fun just continued like nothing had happened. Chatting about politics, the weather, Second Life, Real Life, and whatnot. Actually, it was so funny. There was this Canadian lady who had the avatar of a Blowfish (AKA Puffyfish). And I just thought: isn't this typical ... one day you're moving some prims around, trying to build something, the other day you hear fish talk !!
Did that crash have anything to do with Voice? It is true, SL has had a lot of connectivity trouble, server blackouts and other bad gridwide crashes lately. But is it due to Voice? It is what a lot of people have been screaming from the rooftops, even begging Linden Lab not to go ahead with Voice until at least they fixed a number of known bugs and improve performance.
There was a SL Mentor present, so I asked him a couple of questions ...
SL Newspaper: What is the single most question you get as a mentor?
SL Mentor: how do I enable voice? is the top
SL Newspaper: have you had a lot of grief, or heard about it, from residents who were disgruntled about voice coming to SL?
SL Mentor: no, someone else mentioned voice griefers last night. voice griefers would be people who just broadcast noise throgh the voice line.. I haven't experienced that yet.
He seemed pretty preoccupied with helping people, so I didn't want to disturb him any more than I already did. However, I guess his answers do say something. A new kind of griefing, and still plenty of people having trouble getting it to work. I guess Voice does have its drawbacks. On the other hand, a lot of people posing as someone from the opposite sex will not be able to continue their act anymore. And will it enhance sexual experiences? Will it really lead to people using it for that, like an enhanced version of phone sex? Or will more business come to Second Life, using Voice to actually talk to customers?
As usual, I get stuck with more questions than answers. But the future will show. After half a month of Voice being available to all, it's just hard to say.
On a scale of hotness of 1 to 5, I give voice a moderate 3.5.
Please look forward to our 3rd and last episodes of Hot or Not, when Windlight will become publically available (in the main viewer or as First Look), and I hope that will be soon. And thanks go to the Blowfish with the beautiful voice, Sage Straaf, for letting me use a picture of her and her avatar, and of course our SL Mentor DoteDote Edison, for taking the time to answer a few of my questions.
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