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Second Life Preview with Voice Beta!

While most of you are probably aware of this already, there's a Beta Version of Second Life available with Voice support.

Jeremy Flagstaff blogged this on SLPodcast.com and Johnny talks about this on SecondCast #56 with Philip and Joe Linden, too. Unfortunately the podcast is in mono and doesn't convey the spatial sound experience at all, the quality however is rather good.

It's a quite awesome experience and opens up a whole new dimension for Second Life. I've already forgotten how to open the chat history.

Last night a small crowd gathered and Spike and Monroe Linden gave an introduction of how the technology works, answered questions and gathered some feedback from individuals.

If you would like to try it out (Windows and Mac users so far, unfortunately a Linux build was not offered for download yet) grab the preview client, log in, and head to the Lusk area, which seems to be the only area that is voice enabled at the moment.

While transparent to the user, voice is run through a separate voice server with technology from Vivox, who really know what they're doing. The experience is great. Last night we had a blast flying around while singing the Flight of the Valkyries.

The sound was clear and the positional sound makes it easy to pick out individuals in a crowd, even when many (15+) residents are talking at the same time! This is because you are "hearing" with your camera, so by alt+zooming around you can change which avatar you want to focus your attention on. We also observed that we'd naturally start forming circles, so everybody can see and hear each other and also make out where someone is talking from.

While it's not possible to mute individual voice participants, it's definitely on the to-do list and will be implemented before the public rollout on the main grid. Audio griefing will certainly be part of the experience, and when done in moderation and creatively it can be quite fun. We had one individual who kept blowing raspberries into the mic while running around the crowd in circles. Hearing that with the positional audio (which updates its position ten times a second) was hilarious.

Server stability is decent, although we did end up experiencing some crashes every now and then. That is, the voice server would crash and restart. This can easily be fixed by going into the preferences dialog, disabling and then re-enabling voice chat, which would cause the Second Life client to reconnect to the voice server.

So, while it's certainly a beta, the only real issues with this are the rather random to rare voice server crashes and the lack of individual mute feature. The Lindens mentioned we may be able to see the feature in the First Look client some time in April. That would be great, because the current Voice Beta client does not include the frame rate optimizations.

If you haven't already, give this a try and join our discussions on how this will "revolutionize" Second Life, result in new games (SL Marco Polo, Name-that-Alt), and change the way the escort service industry will operate.

Posted by Second Life Resident Mark Barrett.