Dr Dobbs Life 2.0 today hosted an interesting event with Rob Seaver CEO of Vivox, the company that Linden Lab used to bring voice capability to Second Life. Seaver was here to talk about the future development of SL Voice and one key new feature that has just been implemented. The entire event was staged using in world Second Life voice technology.

Whats unusual about the picture above ? Well nothing at first glance – except that the two speakers are actually on different sides of adjoining sim boundaries. Normally with Second Life voice this would result in each panel member being unable to hear each other. But Vivox have changed “some areas of the grid” to enable cross sim boundary voice.

This will result in voice being usable for much larger events, as the entire audience of 50+ avatars could hear. The backchat was also far more immediate and responsive, and questions were taken in voice as well as text at the end. We also had a looser after event discussion in voice. During questions Seaver mentioned that Vivox are also currently working on recording technology for events, which I know from another source to be relatively “near”.

I asked Seaver : “As Vivox have currently created the only way of creating long unhindered streams of audio through spatial point sources in a fully “streaming” world such as Second Life. Have you considered developing Vivox into a company that delivers things other than voice communications ?”

He said Vivox are interested in developing all kinds of solutions, which may include the streaming of remotely hosted files through in world objects. However he was clear to emphasise this is all speculation and depends entirely on Linden Lab’s trajectory.

In the informal discussion after the session, I mentioned the possibility of improving the performance of SLVoice for music and sound design use. Seaver said “yes I think in the longer term there could be a range of compression settings to allow for higher quality”. We also discussed the possibilty of stereo streams, which he was very interested in.

I’m going to be having some more discussions about these possibilities with members of Vivox, in relation to the Metamusic series of discussions, centered around improving the audio landscape of streaming virtual environments.