SL Voice Test

From uvvy

I am participating in the closed beta voice test in Second Life. I will report in this notebook.

I took a souvenir picture of my first voice chat test in Second Life: I think this is a very important moment in the history of Second Life - operational 3D voice will raise SL to a new level of maturity as a global VR communication platform.

The first test worked well on my MacBook Pro with built in microphone. I downloaded and installed the beta client with voice chat enabled, went to the test grid, found people talking and joined them. My only problem was that at first I had not realized that I was supposed to press the selected "Push to Talk" key to speak, so I could hear people but they could not hear me. Then I realized that I had to keep the Shift key (can be changed) key pressed to talk, and everything worked fine.

I have been impressed with the quality and usability of the system. It is *much* better than what I expected. I will do my best to contribute useful feedback, and I am sure in a few months we will have an operational voice communication system in Second Life.

Second test: we had a group conversation with about 10-12 people and were able to have a reasonably real conversation (in the sense that everyone couls hear and talk to the others). We made experiments of volume settings, push-to-talk etc. People should either wear headphones or use push-to-talk - otherwise one generates too much background noise. With standard settings on my Mac with built-in mic, the right mouth-mic distance is about 20 cm (normal working distance).