[sldev] VWR-10311 Enabling lip sync by default

[Ron Blechner]

Reposting your reason here for everyone to see:
"It is a nice feature but when it comes down to the essentials of
being able to use SL it is unnecessary fluff and people shouldn't have
to have it on by default and then have it be on them to have to figure
out how to turn it off."

So lipsync is "unnecessary fluff", eh?

Why?

I mean, plenty of people argue that all of Second Life is "unnecessary
fluff". "What good is a virtual world?" people ask... most people hold
the opinion that Second Life is a *game*. But it's not - we're here
all as developers pushing Second Life as a platform for a variety of
uses. Some of us make a living doing so. But let's look at the feature
itself.

Why is lipsync fluff or not fluff? To me, it seems ridiculous that we
voice talk and what is shown indicates that our avatars are all
telepathically communicating. That's lame, in my opinion. Lipsync is a
standard used on a variety of online games, and as I've stated, they
both add to the immersion and make it clearer who's currently
speaking. Let's look at each of these one at a time.

Making it clearer who's speaking:

Second Life is NOT an easy platform to use. Studies from Linden Lab
have shown that it takes up to 20 hours of using Second Life before
you can guarantee a "permanent" resident. Anything that improves the
ease of use is thus extremely valuable. When I use voice chat in a
group, it's often disorienting who's talking.  Yes, there are the
volume indicators above peoples' heads, but this is not intuitive. We
live real life where we see peoples' mouths move and that's an
indication of speaking, and so having the same in Second Life is thus
more intuitive.

Immersion:

Why bother doing anything in a virtual world? Immersion is the #1
thing that virtual worlds such as Second Life have and flat-web does
not. The more things that make a user feel connected with their avatar
by proxy, and make them suspend their disbelief to feel "present", the
more that the immersion factor is felt. Lipsync is, in my professional
assessment, *the single most important missing element for immersion*.

Since Stephenson's Snow Crash inspired Rosedale and 90% of all the
other devs in here poking around with virtual worlds, allow me to
quote from the book when describing how under-appreciated faces are on
avatars. The quote describes an employee of "Black Sun" where the
character is the only person who cared at the time about faces.
"She was the face department, because nobody thought that faces were
all that important - they were just flesh-toned busts on top of the
avatars. She was in the process of proving them all desperately wrong.
But at this phase, the all-male society of bitheads that made up the
power structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was
trivial and superficial."

Face *is* immersion. When you look at machinima nowadays done with SL,
it's all done with the lipsync client. If you look at contemporary
animated movies and video games, all faces are animated. It's an
absolute no-brainer.

Lipsync is unnecessary about as much as a walk animation. We could, in
theory, float around everywhere. But that's silly. And so is the lack
of avatars moving their lips when they are talking.

You know what's fluff? Reflections. Shiny. And these are WAY more CPU
intensive than some *client-rendered* mesh-stretching, which is what
your computer does 100% of the time anyway as the avatar moves around
and figits.

There's simply no good reason I've read so far that's been presented.
Again, I'd love to hear one. I'd love to hear someone give a legit
reason that we could address and use as constructive criticism to
improve the lipsyncing features. But seeing none, let's get this
feature out, not just in the branch viewer, but on the main one. If
someone's going to use voice chat, they should have lipsync as well.

-Ron


On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 9:57 PM, Gordon Wendt <GordonWendt at gmail.com> wrote:
> To answer the question as to why I hold my view, I think I answered it well
> enough on the JIRA issue.  Incidentally I don't agree with many of the other
> opinions here but I just wanted to say that I do not agree with Anne and
> that my views are nowhere near that extreme, there are plenty of options
> that definitely should be on by default I just don't believe this is one of
> them and regardless of the motives in doing so I resent this being pushed
> through the back door.  There are still legitimate ways to do this without
> sneaking in through a little heard of (outside of this list) branch of the
> viewer and trying to do this reflects very poorly on the ethics of both the
> people supporting this attempt and the Lindens who are supporting it.
>
> -Gordon
>
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-- 
Ron Blechner
Chief Technology Officer
Involve, Inc
www.involve3d.com