Text vs. Voice in Second Life and other Virtual Worlds

Second Life does not have “native voice” capabilities, though there are some Vivox callboxes, and folks use a variety of different technologies such as TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, Skype, and G-Talk.

Seeing text chat as an impediment to education is something of a mistake. For one thing, digital natives (and digital immigrants) are able to communicate in different ways with multiple simultaneous IMs, SMS texting, etc.

Voice gets very laggy when you got lots of text going on, things start…. to sound… very… umm… [pause 5 seconds] disjointed. But with text, the other person doesn’t wait for the voice to come out and can attend to other things. People’s typing speeds are increasing over time, so there may be a generation lost on the new technology because of an inability or lack of motivation to adapt.

Put another way, especially around institutions of higher learning, you still tend to hear stuff like “I still use PINE, it works for me, except when people send me HTML mail, I hate that…” Holy cow! We can see how cut off from visual email elements (not to mention voice or other rich media) this individual is, e.g., embedded images, video (gmail has an embedded mp3 player for voicemail).

Philip Linden has a good take on both the promise of voice and its relation to other communication technologies. This excerpt is from an O’Reilly Radar posting (excerpting from a CNet interview I believe), found here:

Let’s talk about voice support in “Second Life.” Vivox is now doing a push for its third-party VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) client/phone booth in-world. What should “Second Life” residents expect when it comes to voice support from Linden Lab?
Rosedale: OK. First, we clearly agree that voice can be very powerful in “Second Life” for many things. There is a critical feature–the ability to properly 3D-spatialize multiple people speaking in a room, that is going to allow meetings in “Second Life” between many people to blow away conference calls. This is a very powerful thing, and we want to get it working.
When?
Rosedale: I have seen demos where three or four people could talk at the same time and I could understand them perfectly. So that is a huge potential feature. But not everyone wants voice all the time. And text (communication) is very, very powerful. For example, I can use (a translation tool) I am fond of, but that only works when, socially, we are using text and are therefore tolerant of a slight delay. So ideally, the implementation shouldn’t push one over the other, or have everyone with voice “forcing” those without it or not wanting it to use it. So we are going to be careful with any built in capability, to make that work

I think having people learn how to type at a reasonable speed is something we assume is necessary for our students. As well, IM, texting and other text-based technologies should be at least familiar to students. Educators should not hold themselves to a lower standard.

Related posts:

  1. Virtual Journalism and Journalism of the Virtual
  2. Banking in Second Life gets competitive
  3. Bransford presentation in Second Life
  4. Real World and Second Life interpenetrate
November 8, 2006 • Posted in: Audio, Second Life

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