A podcast from the Chronicle of Higher Education was released today called An Anthropologist Goes Native In a Virtual World, where Tom Boellstorff, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine, discusses his research in Second Life. He is in the process of releasing a book on his work.

[Professor Boellstroff’s Avatar]

The interview explores Professor Boellstroff’s engagements in Second Life along with his thoughts on Virtual Worlds. Professor Boellstroff’s discussion on getting to know a person or avatar is quite fascinating, where he explores how in the real world one gets to know a person outside in, while in the virtual world, they get to know them inside out. He explains how in Second Life there is no pre-judging, where you don’t know if the person is a man or women, 80 or 20 years old, their ethnicity or religion—you are only meeting their avatar, which gives you superior access to a persons intimate self.

Listen to the podcast by clicking here.

After weeks of voice testing on the Beta Gird, Linden Labs announced today that Voice is Live on the main grid. The voice client is going to revolutionize the way avatars interact with each other in Second Life — yet another component of Second Life which is blurring the lines between reality and virtual reality.

[IMG of the voice client found in the lower right hand corner of SL applet]

As quoted from the Second Life’s blog, they present a few key points regarding the voice client:

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Voice is an optional feature. Though Voice is part of the main viewer now, it is turned off by default. You must explicitly choose to enable voice in order to use it, and can turn it on and off as you wish. Voice can be enabled and disabled in Edit > Preferences > Voice Chat. A voice set-up wizard will also appear once, during “first use” or “first Resident login to a voice viewer.” You can use it to set-up voice if you wish.

Voice is available everywhere. Please note that voice is available throughout Second Life, and all regions have been enabled. Estate owners can disable voice on their estates if they choose.

Voice is controlled by you. Parcel owners can control how voice is used on their parcel via the “About Land” dialog. Also, individual Residents may be muted via the Active Speakers window or by right-clicking on their avatar. Read more in the Voice FAQ:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Voice_FAQ

Voice is open source. For anyone interested in contributing to open source voice development, we have released the tarball for voice here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Source_downloads#ver_1.18.1.2

Voice is hosted on separate servers. Many Residents have expressed concern and confusion as to why voice would be released when Second Life periodically has performance issues. Voice is intentionally designed to run on systems completely independent from Second Life as not to impair performance.

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What’s next for the first look viewer? It seems that Linden labs will be releasing a client with new atmospheric rendering, but more on that later.

Chronos Laval