[extropy-chat] An excellent overview of SecondLife from a futurist persective

[Neil H.]

On 4/2/06, "Hal Finney" <hal at finney.org> wrote:

> Building and scripting in 2L works great, and avatar customization
> is also very flexible, but I find that the communication tools are
> relatively poor.  In particular, it is very difficult to use gestures in
> a flexible way.  If you want to, say, point at someone, or wave your arms
> expansively, or stroke your chin, the only way to do that is to find and
> (usually) buy a canned animation that performs that gesture.  You can
> then bind it to a hotkey, or select it from a cumbersome menu system.
> If you have in mind a particular gesture that has not been made available,
> you need to use a complicated third party animation program like Poser
> to design the whole sequence, and upload it.


Quick idea: It (hypothetically) wouldn't be too hard to incorporate an
off-the-shelf gesture recognition algorithm with the game. One could hit a
button, do a simple gesture (like waving your hand), and then have some
rough approximation of it replicated by your character.

Sounds are similarly limited to canned .wav files that can be uploaded
> and called up by a hotkey.  A further problem is that people don't tend
> to hear the sounds at the moment you trigger them, because they have to
> be downloaded to each person nearby, so there is a several-second delay
> the first time you trigger a sound.  The same thing sometimes happens
> with gestures, not everybody sees them at the same time.


I wonder why Second Life hasn't taken advantage of VoIP software. Plenty of
online games already make use of things like Roger Wilco and TeamSpeak to
allow for voice communication between participants. Could also be
interesting to try combining it with text-to-speech or speech-to-text
software.

Actually, after some googling it looks like a company called Vivox is trying
to do some related things:

http://www.mpogd.com/news/?ID=1962

"To make the case for what Vivox is capable of, Sharma logged into a test
area in Second Life on his laptop to demonstrate an audio technology demo.
The environment was a bustling restaurant, where the wireless broadband
connection was not ideal. That said, I donned a pair of headphones and
listed as Sharma's character walked to an in-game phone booth and punched
the digits to his own cell phone, which then promptly rang. Using VoIP
calling like other Internet telephony services such as
Vonage<http://www.vonage.com/>,
Sharma blurred the line between in-game and real-world communications. After
that, the avatar was walked into a nearby room, where another Vivox
developer was lounging on a couch as a character. Using the laptop
microphone, Sharma and I were able to carry on a conversation with him at
roughly the quality of a land line phone."

Another idea, which may or may not be feasible: Facial expressions taken
from a webcam. One could use an off-the-shelf face detection algorithm (e.g.
Viola & Jones 2001), and periodically paste a new image of the user's face
onto the avatar. It could also display a question mark if the user isn't
sitting in front of their computer.

The bottom line is that as a result, the only real way to communicate
> in 2L is by typing.  Basically it becomes nothing more than a glorified
> chat room when it is time to engage in conversation.  This is what I
> find most frustrating; it takes me out of the virtual world experience.
> Conversations tend to be extremely static, a bunch of good-looking
> avatars standing still and making typing motions with their hands
> (that's the default animation when someone types).
>
> Overall my feeling is that 2L works well as a platform for building and,
> to a lesser extent, scripting interesting objects and constructions.
> There are some very beautiful builds and the world is an extremely dynamic
> place, with new constructions appearing all the time.  But as a meeting
> place or conversational medium, it's still stuck in the 20th century.
> I engaged in real time computer chat in college in the 1970s, and aside
> from adding pictures of people standing around, that's still pretty much
> what you get when you meet people in 2L.
>
> Hal
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