[sldev] Voice

[Nicholaz Beresford]

Tateru Nino wrote:
> That and the size of the communicate window are my two big bugbears - 

You can tear off the "Near me" and it will act mostly like the old
history (it has a few quirks too, but it's an improvment if you have
to use the voice viewer and there are so many usability quirks in
there that I won't even bother to list them).

But yes, the use of screen real estate seems to be the biggest gripe
out there (for me also).

It sort of reduces the in-world stuff to an animated background
wallpaper.  I noticed this already when using the voice viewer, it
is a sublte cause, but for me has a fundamental effect on the way
I use SL.

I assume it's less noticeable with actually using voice, because I
guess using voice will draw the attention away from the screen anyway
... equally fundamental but probably less noticeably for those who
do, because people who tend to use voice, seem to tend to use SL in
a less immersive way anyway.  I guess these are more those kind of
people who write articles about SL saying it's a chatroom with
3D avatars and now it's going to be Skype with pictures.

The longer I think about it and play with it, the more I'm getting
the impression, that this stuff will have profound effects by
affecting users in intuive and subconscious ways.

It's obviously a business decision, maybe the next gen
teleconferencing system will be more profitable than an immersive
excape route and hideout from real life.

But, as I said, I can only hope the Lindens know what they're
doing (that and that the message liberation will hold up for
long enough that it's worthwhile investing efforts in developing
alternatives.)



> Third place has to go to the FL voice viewer using an /order of 
> magnitude/ more RAM for the same settings (570MB vs 57MB for 
> Nicholaz18a). That's just crazy now. :)

You need to be careful about that.  Even on my machine Windows does
some odd things reporting memory.   My viewer just using 57MB is
unrealistic, it's probably Windows reporting something weird.  As
long as the new one (I have not tested that) does not go much beyond
my rule of thumb from the blog, they're probably more or less equal.



Nick