First of all, voice chat is an option for two or more people in nearby proximity to each other. If you have a microphone, you can activate your voice chat, talk to the surrounding avatars through your mic and listen to what they have to say. By default, voice chat is activated when you login to SL. But under my preferences and setup, I have it disabled. Why? Well, for one it creates more lag. It slows your computer down making your online experience less enjoyable. The majority of people in SL are still communicating via the keyboard. Secondly, I might cough or worse, and nobody needs to hear that.
So I keep SL chat shut off unless someone expresses interest in talking. This last voice chat session for me was a couple of nights ago with cat, rose, Neva and Archer. Archer loves to voice chat for very good reason. He speaks and types in various languages. He is from the Netherlands and is fluent in German and English to name a couple of languages. While he can type in English quite well, it's an effort for him. So when we (me and cat) get together with him, we normally converse in voice chat. It was fortunate that Neva was able to talk as well. Unfortunately, rose was unable to hear us nor say anything, so we tried to keep her updated to the conversation as we went along by typing in regular text chat. Neva was best at this as I kept getting lost in the vocal conversation.
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| In voice chat. The space station in the background. |
So I rezzed some new chairs I had just purchased and we all sat around on this huge platform I created to build my space station. We talked about Archer's new employment in RL and about Neva's man and of course my space station. I even rezzed a car I made for Archer to try out. I warned him not to drive off the edge of the platform but it was inevitable. He started falling all the way to the ground. But before he got there, I was able to send him a teleport invite and he accepted and was among us without getting killed and sent home. Yes, I have damage enabled on the sim so if you fall a long ways, you will die and be sent home. That would be undesirable so a quick teleport invitation was prudent. Anyway, it was a wonderful chat and we were able to exchange a great deal of information in a very short period of time as opposed to typing everything out.
Another nice thing about voice chat is you can actually hear the real voice of the avatar. It's just too easy for say a gay man to make a female avatar and play with heterosexual men without them knowing they are really being erotic with another male.
Parcel music streams are just that, a source of music for the entire parcel. You can set it to any of the streaming radio stations out there on the web and the music will play in your SL viewer as you exist in-world. Many people seem to leave this on automatically but personally, I thing music can be a distraction while building something, so I have mine off by default. Of course when I DJ, I have to have it on so I can hear the music I'm playing. The only time I turn the volume down is when I need to speak into the microphone. If I were to leave the volume up, there would be an annoying echo. This echo is due to the fact that there is a delay from when I say something to when people in-world hear it. It's anywhere from 1 second to 45 seconds. Why? I'm not sure. But I know that the longer a stream is running, the shorter the delay becomes. By the end of a two hour event, I tend to be delayed only about 5 seconds or less.
Video media is another possible stream into SL. Video can be viewed while looking at a texture that the parcel settings recognize as a video surface. This is a little tricky to explain and understand but basically, if you are the land owner, you can load a texture into your parcel's media settings and anywhere else you use that texture, streaming video can be viewed. So basically, many people use the texture of the blank screen of a TV, then put that same texture on a prim making it appear to be a powered down TV. Then they find a video source such as YouTube and paste that into the parcel's video stream source settings. After all that, if an avatar turns on their video media and that video texture is within view, they can watch the video stream. This video setting can be set to always on by default but again, this option creates even more lag than voice chatting so I have mine off by default. But I have known people to get on voice chat and sit in an SL movie theater, start their video streams simultaneously and enjoy a movie together.
While all this does sound ideal, it does not always function as anticipated. Linden Labs is always working on improvements to their streaming media controls, and have come a very long way in the past four years, but the quality of voice chat has much room for improvement when compared to a voice chat application such as Skype. But while the video stream may cause lag, if you are in SL to watch a video and not walk around and interact, it's a very cool feature. The prim that the graphic texture resides on actually becomes the video itself. It's pretty cool.
