This week, Linden Lab announced that Second Life residents will soon have the ability to communicate via voice chat in-world. Until now, using voice meant cobbling together makeshift systems, which often involved a combination of third party services. A few companies also offered limited voice chat capabilities in-world, including Second Talk (Skype based) and Vivox that were based on the avatar’s proximity to the client’s station and limited to a group of five. Linden Lab has partnered with Vivox and Diamondware to provide a new way for residents to interact with voice that promises to revolutionize virtual world communications. Congrats to Vivox on landing this deal. I would have thought a Telco (maybe Telus?) would have seized this opportunity, but I’m glad to see a start-up get in there and make this happen.
If you’re looking to try out the Vivox service, there are already several places in SL where their current offering is available. This is different from what was announced, but it gives you a sense of the voice capabilities that exist.
There are a lot of implications on how this new offering will affect the social landscape, but I’m going to focus for this post on the implications of chat for corporate business in Second Life.
Language: With more than 65% of Second Life accounts originating outside the US, language is an obvious hurdle to community building and business interactions. SL resident Max Case came up with a very effective tool to overcome that hurdle in text chat with the Babbler, a device that allowed avatars to easily chat by translating the text in to their respective languages in real time. I used it often to show non-English speaking/typing avatars around our island. But voice presents a new challenge. Initially, I think businesses will continue to use text for common interactions. Voice will likely also bring people speaking the same language closer together, creating new communities. This also presents opportunities for larger companies to showcase their global nature. Text 100 has 30 offices worldwide, and it will be fun to visit our Island and hear several different languages being spoken simultaneously. It will also allow us to change our presence and improve our assistance to clients and prospects.
Immediacy: Executives are strapped for time and many feel it’s too laborious to type out conversations in real time. With text, you can dip out of the conversation, take a call or reply to an email and then go back to Second Life and see what you’ve missed in the chat history. But you can’t do that with voice chat. It will dramatically affect the quality of the conversations. No more stilted text and no more playing catch-up. Rather than trying to express one’s self with the least amount of writing, one will be able to speak more naturally allowing a more fluid conversational dynamic. I imagine all this will enable business executives to participate in SL with a much lower pain threshold. It will hopefully increase their willingness to spend time immersed in the world, yielding more fruitful interactions with customers and partners.
Meetings: Thus far, we still use PowerPoint presentations to hold real-time meetings in SL. Often the leader will use Skype, but if there are more than five participants, the others can only listen and communicate via text chat. While Skype helped, the conversation was still largely one to many. There was no effective way to converse with the presenter. Chat will ease that burden and help to facilitate more effective team meetings. They will be faster. They will be more participatory. It will also improve communications among employees from different parts of the country in a way that even web conferencing was unable to do, which goes a long way towards making Second life a truly immersive environment.
Events: When I explain how the Second Life event experience differs from a web meeting or conference call to business executives, they are often perplexed. At the MacArthur Foundation launch event, we were able to bring people in to the discussion that would otherwise not have been able to participate because of geography. We could also facilitate an entirely separate discussion that served as an extension of what was happening in real life. I also talk about the visceral reaction you have to someone standing next to you, chatting. I try to describe the way that the same pressure you have in a social situations when someone approaches you at a party and begins talking to you apply to a virtual world event as well. But without voice, it’s not equivocal. The chat feature will serve to enhance the reality of the virtual world experience by truly putting you in the same room that so far can only be achieved in real life. Of course, the person standing next to you might still look like a cat wearing an army jacket and red skirt, but that’s awesome.
Training: We have close to 90 employees in Second Life from our offices around the world. In order to introduce SL and the business proposition that we offer, the peer media team has created scripts and other materials to facilitate a better understanding of virtual worlds. Now, with the ability to communicate via voice, the training sessions should be a lot easier and the adoption by employees even more natural. It’s easier to answer questions on the go without having to wait for people to type out their questions. Answers can be more thoughtful and detailed without extending the length of the training sessions. And for companies that want to use Second Life for training purposes, it will allow them to better simulate actual training scenarios.
Guided tours: Text 100 offers customized guided tours of Second Life for business prospects and clients. The difficulty in these tours is that most interested executives haven’t actually been in Second Life before. Because of the orientation process and learning curve, many opt to have me show them around while they watch via a web conferencing host. Although the analogy isn’t entirely accurate, I think it’s like playing video games vs. watching someone else play video games (though SL is not a game). Chat will make it easier for me to help guide new visitors around, make introductions and facilitate improved group interactions.
What are your thoughts? Am I off base here? How do you see voice chat affecting corporate business in SL?
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