I’ve been waiting to say anything here about the developing Voice Chat that Second Life will add soon. A lot of pros and cons are being thrown about. I weighed in about audio in general in SL in a column in the Metaverse Messenger on Jan. 30 (issue available here), but that was before Joe Linden announced the details of what it would be like.

I still have reservations, but different ones. I’m not alone. Akela Talamasca has expressed several concerns, including the loss of anonymity that many SL residents value so highly, as well as something akin to “breaking the fourth wall” in TV. I fear that, rather than making SL more realistic, it will actually highlight the artificiality of virtual reality, lessening rather than heightening the “sense of presence.”

In a followup, Talamasca enumerated problems observed in actual beta testing. Among those that have particular educational concern (quoting from Talamasca):

• In a group of 10 – 12 people, 2 or 3 dominated the conversation just like RL.
• Voice chat effectively kills text chat.

One of SL’s big pluses for education is that it encourages participation in ways neither real life nor text chat/discussion boards do. These two taken together could lead, in effect, to “why should we do SL, then?” The loss of a text chat will also mean the loss of a history (that is, a record) of the conversation, making it impossible to look back and see what was said earlier. This is probably a big factor in why two or three people dominate conversations in audio chat and in real life—those of us who score as strong Introverts in a Myers-Briggs type like to think about what we say before we say it, which means the conversation has moved on by the time we’re ready to say something. That’s not a problem in text chat with a text history. It is in a classroom or an audio chat.

Wagner James Au also raises several other concerns, including effective division of SL because of language (translation tools allow more interaction in text chat), and as a teacher of speech communication, I am concerned that we will once again make snap judgments about people based on how they sound. It has been a real advantage of SL that text chat enabled people to avoid first impressions based on accent, pleasantness of tone, etc.

On the positive side, Talamasca noted, “The spatial effect works well; nearer avatars were louder than those farther away.” Joe Linden’s post indicates the use of stereo will also allow you to have an instantaneous, gut level feel for where the speaker is–not just distance, but right or left, giving a pinpoint sense missing in text chat.

An article in Campus Technology quotes one of the longest-teaching faculty in SL (Terry Beaubois, professor of architecture and director of the College of Arts & Architecture’s Creative Research Lab at Montana State University):

Many of the projects my students and I are working on in Second Life will benefit from voice, as we often work with our hands, designing, building and creating. Voice will enable us to communicate and collaborate freely, and I’m looking forward to exploring its use.

It’s going to happen, no doubt. Like any other technology, it has advantages and disadvantages. We’ll just have to see which weighs more.