It's nice to find people who understand. Don Heider, associate at the Journalism School at the University of Maryland and Kim Gregson, professor of Journalism, Park School, Ithaca College, talk in a three way audio interview about Second Life at the Online News Association annual meeting in Toronto.

The Shelter gets a positive mention (and so it should!). A lot of territory gets covered, what Second Life is, anonymity (and the lack thereof), Second Life as a virchspace extension of the physical world, physical world extrusions of brands and businesses into Second Life, CSI:NY, Linden Lab's business model and more. Not 100% complete (it would be much longer for one thing) and not quite totally correct, but still well worth listening to, especially if Second Life is a bit opaque to you.

This might be of peripheral interest to most of you, for which I'm sorry. However, for those of you that use ambient sound effects, it just might be a godsend. Soundsnap offer a range of sound effects and loops for you to freely use including in commercial ventures - the sound effects and loops personally recorded by the contributer and added to the library - and they offer you the chance to do the same.

I've had a bit of a dig through, and there's quite a range of effects there. Being hard of hearing I'm not always the best placed person to judge quality, and in this case the aesthetics are in the ear of the beholder of course, but there are some things I can hear and they sound pretty good to me - they should, as many are recorded by film and TV audio engineers.

(Thanks to John from Soundsnap for the tip.)

powered by ODEO

A friend of mine, Tim Holt who is working on a pretty cool looking Mars Based MMOG, went off the the Austin Games Conference last week, and he decided it was fun to rub it in my face that I missed an awesome talk on the future of virtual worlds. Well in your face Tim, Mark Wallace posted the audio of the talk on his website. As it turns out it is an excellent talk featuring Corey Bridges of Multiverse, Raph Koster formally of SOE, Cory Ondrejka of Second Life, and Mark Wallace of 3PointD. All of this hosted by Jerry Paffendorf the resident futurist of the Electric Sheep Company. This is a stellar group of people with a broad variety of virtual world experience.

I almost titled this talk the clash of the Corys, but it was a much more equitable exchange than that title would imply. The talk provides a great deal of information on Second Life, the future of Second Life, and also who is gunning for Second Life's thrown as king of the virtual worlds. I left feeling really excited about what is coming in soon to a virtual world near you.

I think, all in all, I'm pretty happy with the sound features of Second Life. I only hear music when I choose to, and the occasional ambient sounds are a nice touch. However, recently I got to thinking about the idea of having live voice chat capabilities the other day, and... I dunno. I think it might be more harmful than helpful. Consider:

When you read a good book, you supply the character voices, so they are ideal. When you see the movie version, or even see a cartoon version of your favorite story, you're usually bound to be disappointed somewhat; 'that guy doesn't sound like what I thought he should!' And I imagine that this effect would carry over to SL. You're talking with a gorgeous avatar, when you decide to enable voice chat. Suddenly, a new dimension to the flirtation enters the picture, and it can go either way. Don't downplay the power of voice: some people have the aural equivalent of 'a great face for radio'. As shallow as it may sound, an unsexy voice (or accent) can be a deal-breaker.

Let's also consider that many of us are simply more glib and witty when it comes to writing. I myself tend toward mumbling and repeating 'Uhh' when speaking aloud. I'm not saying that everyone does this, but when you've known a person through their visuals for so long, you have, realize it or not, come to expect that their speech patterns are exactly the same as their writing style.

I'd like to be proven wrong about this, but it's occurred so often before that it'll be interesting to see (and hear) what happens when voice chat is finally implemented. Sound off in the comments section!