Avatar, Phone Home

Interesting item regarding phone services inside virtual spaces. From the entry on MPOGD posted by Paul Philleo (Link):

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, 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.

Be sure to read the whole entry to get some additional details; I’m just focusing on one slice of it. The “voice font” stuff will probably calm the fears of plenty, gender-bending alts.

via Clickable Culture