[sldev] VWR-10311 Enabling lip sync by default

[Philip Rosedale]

Sorry gang that I've been away from the list for a few days, I sometimes 
get busy.  We had a board meeting tuesday, etc.  OK! 

This is clearly a tough issue with lots of appropriate debate.  Good 
example of the kind of thing we'll need to feel our way into some sort 
of a process for.  After reading the thread on this topic as closely as 
I've had time, here are my summary thoughts:

*  We need a clear and discoverable place in the UI where this feature 
can be enabled and disabled.  Probably prefs. Can someone take on that 
design and coding?   Advanced-> isn't the right home for this.  We 
should do that work properly and well to complete this feature.

* Can someone (Mike?) add a bit more detail on the jira task to 
defend/review that the CPU impact is strictly capped.  For example, what 
is the LOD behavior if there are 100 avatars all talking at the same 
time.  We have LOD tricks for various rendering aspects of the system, 
do they correctly carry through?  Does the CPU load of the feature vary 
by GPU?  I think we need this level of documentation.

* As to the question of whether to default it on or off, clearly it is a 
complex issue.  I'd say lets default it on, and make sure it is easy to 
find the way to turn it off.  For some use cases it is very cool, 
lending immersion and cueing as to speaker.  For other cases you will 
want it off.  We are still at the point where the 'uncanny valley' 
nature of the feature can make it unnerving, and that problem is 
unlikely to be easily solved soon in realtime with low CPU load.

As a final note, I'd say this is a good example of a tough topic where 
the right call is unclear and discussion and debate is appropriate.  
Also a good case of where if need be, I can just make a call and we move 
on and see what happens.  Given that, why the rudeness I am seeing 
here?  I don't see a need to be insulting to each other over this 
topic.  Maybe I've missed some painful history here, but can't see how 
this is helping us move forward.  I wouldn't work internally on projects 
at LL with colleagues that were overly rude, I don't see why it should 
be any different here!

Philip


Philippe Bossut (Merov Linden) wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thanks Moritz for the fair and clear summary of this issue. Putting in 
> my L$0.02, I'll add that we think it's fine to have this "turned on by 
> default" (which will only impact residents using voice chat as stated 
> in that thread) and that our BDFL already said so (may be not in 
> public though... Philip?). We already selected this VWR as one of the 
> community voted feature that we'll get in "http-texture" (aka the 
> "Second Life OSS" viewer).
>
> Since I'm at it, there is a wiki page that lists the bugs and features 
> we (collective "we", not just Lindens...) are working on for the next 
> and first release of this viewer. It is there:
> https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/HTTP_Texture_Development#Pending_merge_queue_proposals
>
> I'll follow up on another thread on the state of that viewer so far in 
> a little while.
>
> Cheers,
> - Merov
>
>
> On Apr 29, 2009, at 3:42 PM, Moriz Gupte wrote:
>
>> To summarize and to clarify:
>> I feel these are the points important to state
>>
>> 1. We are not discussing voice
>> 2. Voice has always been optional
>> 3. lipsync has negligible footprint (as Mike has patiently and 
>> repeatedly mentioned inspite of various reflex reactions) In my own 
>> experience, enabling or disabling lipsync has no effect on our fps 
>> and all our machines share the exactly the same settings/I have 3 
>> generations of hardware to work with and no impact experienced.
>> 4. I have been challenged to provide financial info regarding 
>> financial impact of voice on income regarding corporate/education 
>> efforts (LL could perhaps design better survey forms to tease that 
>> info out, I can only tell about my own efforts which is skewed 
>> because of my audience: federal agencies. I would be using another 
>> platform if SL did not integrate voice because this is one of the 
>> primary requirements from RFPs or when you are putting in a 
>> competitive bid while facing other VR platforms such as Forterra 
>> which had lipsync for years and better web integration ) So it is not 
>> entirely mesmerizing why LL has ignored the voice controversy perhaps 
>> because corporations or feds don't pay in Lindens.
>> 5. Enabling voice should trigger lipsync automatically (no need to 
>> overload UI)
>> 6. On a related note, I found that there was a solution for the space 
>> navigator especially regarding vehicle controls in SL and the 
>> integration of that patch is supposed to be for the next main client 
>> [keeping fingers crossed, hope no controversy about this one :)]. 
>> Turns out my audience also prefer for some reason this device (I 
>> prefer the keyboard).
>> 7. The plugin idea is great except that it will require deeper 
>> changes and we are still refactoring right? so while I would love to 
>> see it happen, I dont think those tiny incremental changes should be 
>> left out.
>>
>> There is therefore some understandable frustration regarding the time 
>> it takes for the patches to be integrated (If you find out when Aimee 
>> actually got a handle on this space navigator - vehicles problem, you 
>> will understand the frustration). It is clear that there are many 
>> items with high priority (HTML on a prim is a requirement...for e.g. 
>> and we it's coming any time :) but hey I think these little 
>> incremental improvements are worthwhile. And yes btw, Babbage Linden 
>> (Technical Director?) did mention Mike's work recently, as an example 
>> of user contribution, in one of his talks recently. So I think they 
>> might be more than a few people who like this stuff.
>>
>> MG
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Mike Monkowski 
>> <monkowsk at watson.ibm.com <mailto:monkowsk at watson.ibm.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     Lip sync does not use any more CPU power than the blinking of the
>>     eyes
>>     does.   It does not affect bandwidth at all.  Perhaps you're
>>     confusing
>>     voice chat with lip sync.
>>
>>     Mike
>>
>>     Ann Otoole wrote:
>>     > How ridiculous that anyone would consider forcing the default
>>     to enabled
>>     > on anything that would increase CPU or Bandwidth.
>>     >
>>     > All defaults should be OFF on anything that compounds the problems
>>     > related to system compatibility and ISP efforts to kill
>>     utilization.
>>     > Such as voice.
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