Dizzy Banjo's blog

Hi everyone,

This is a partial recording from a geek meet we had a while ago now about voice technology. It was an interesting discussion Bernhard Drax from Life4u talked about the impact of voice firstly, then I discussed some of the future implications and possibilities of the voice technology. We then had a great talk from Vinny Fardel of Vivox, the company who implemented voice technology for Linden Lab, and some interesting discussion from a number of Lindens, including Joe Linden. At the moment this video just features my part of the talk, but Im sure we will get the rest up soon.

This machinima was created by Joi Koi from stills taken at the event and using some great speech animation software. Thanks Joi !!

Many satellite users are having severe problems with Second Life voice at the moment, including some of my friends in world. According to my discussions with those very helpful folks at Vivox, and a recent discussion with Joe Linden at a metaversed.com event, the problem is actually with the spatial aspects of the audio system - point to point calls can still work.

This has been the case with my friend, however most of the time she just can’t connect to the voice network at all. Anyway I decided to try to form a workaround - however it requires multiple computers.

Having skype calls with my friend seemed to be faultless, so basically I skyped my friend on a laptop and, using pysical cables, routed the output from her call into the SL voice input of an avatar of mine, then routed the output of SL voice from that machine back into the input on the laptop. So she was speaking through a proxy avatar.

It worked really well - she could hear everyone in world, allbeit from the position of my alt avatar, and speak clearly back to everyone with seemingly no delay. Of course all of this relies on having a friend with multiple computers and the correct audio cables.

Hope its useful for some satellite users ! I’m sure the guys at Vivox will hate it, but it bridges a gap at the moment!