Short clip: Linden Lab adding voice to Second Life

Introduction

>> You're introducing voice into this 3D environment?

>> Yes.

>> I'm really interested in how you can do all those things with such a rich, emersive environment and not have huge performance lags and crashes, because there's so many variables in terms of the machines that are accessing Second Life.

>> So in a case of our introduction of voice, which we did 1 year ago today roughly, we've now had over 8 billion minutes of voice consumed by Second Life users, and we're doing over a billion a month on a monthly run rate right now. Looks like we'll do close to 20, 22 billion minutes over the next year. We decided to design the voice overlay, which by the way works in a very interesting way. If you want to speak to 1 other person, or group of 10 other people, you just walk your avatar up to that group, and if you have a headset with a mic on you just begin speaking. You don't have to turn on anything, you don't have to run any secondary apps, you don't have to press any additional buttons. You share your voice in a group, and they hear that voice coming from your location relative to your avatar's 3D positional voice; which is very effective, much more effective than sitting on a conference call where all the voices are sort of superimposed on one another. In this case you can actually carry on a highly effective conference room conversation with 10, 15, 20 people simultaneously, and not have it consumer more bandwidth than talking to a single person.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====