Integrated voice coming to 'Second Life'
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Virtual world's publisher to roll out beta trial next week of voice chatting built directly into the client software.
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RatePoint is extending its rating system to residents of the Second Life online city, who can now determine which virtual neighbors to play and work with.
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As Peugeot gets ready to unviel its 308 RC Z concept car at the Frankfurt auto show, the 2+2 coupe is available for test drives in Second Life, an online virtual world.
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TechWeb - Enterprise Voice Sites allows businesses to build and deploy pre-packaged IVR solutions on a pay-as-you-go usage model.
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VOIP has been hailed for years in the telecom industry as the next big thing, but problems with sound quality have prevented it from gaining widespread acceptance. Now VOIP, which has been available since the mid-1990s, is poised to fulfill its promise.
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Virtual 'House of Sweden' Sweden has announced its intention to be the first nation to have an embassy in Second Life, Reuters reports.â¦
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Upcoming cell phone will offer integrated VoIP features and tools for wireless Web access.
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Here's a productive twist on the animated characters known as avatars that carry out fantasies in virtual computer worlds. IBM Corp. researchers have developed an avatar that can translate spoken words into sign language.
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New chapters in the portal's quest for user-generated content.
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(InfoWorld) - When Intel looks to the next few years of computing, the dollar signs look a lot better in three dimensions, full motion, and high definition. The rise of what Intel calls the 3-D Web will transform the way people use the Internet with a far richer experience, exemplified today by Second Life but turning more realistic and being deployed in medicine and business, CTO Justin Rattner said in a last-day keynote address at theÂ Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The best news for the chip giant, however, is how much computing power all this will take. "This may be the killer app of killer apps," Rattner told reporters after they keynote. "As people demand a more immersive, a more realistic experience, they're just going to push the computing demands to unprecedented levels." The pressure on central and graphics processors has already soared as Internet use expands from traditional Web pages to applications like Google Maps, Google Earth, multiplayer online role-playing games, and Second Life. Going from surfing the traditional Web to traversing Second Life can increase CPU load by three times and graphics processing load by 20 times, he said. Servers need to work harder, too. A server that could support 2,500 concurrent players of the online game World of Warcraft, for example, could only support 160 Second Life participants, Rattner said. Rattner's keynote was colorful and entertaining for an IDF presentation, full of animation and simulations, but he outlined how much farther this richer experience has to go. For example, the kind of realism people expect from movies requires shadows and reflections that move with objects in a scene, he said. Daniel Pohl, a research scientist at Intel, demonstrated high-definition environments in the game Quake that included those elements and others. They demanded nearly all the processing power of a server with dual quad-core Intel x5365 chips. In medicine, doctors are aiming to allow surgery on virtual patients. With current technology, they can simulate cutting a rectangular patch of skin and opening it up in real time, but it would take far more processing power to do the same with a curved piece of skin or something like a cleft palate, according to Joseph Teran, a UCLA assistant professor who participated in the keynote. Other challenges for making the 3-D Web a reality include user interface and standardization, Rattner said. Tasks that take computer artists hours, such as creating shadows or reflections, need to be automated so that the average person can create user-generated content in an elaborate online world. Humans also need a better interface with the online world, Rattner said. He demonstrated the SpaceNavigator from Logitech's 3DConnexion division, which can be pushed and pulled to interact with a virtual environment, and the Novint Falcon, a three-dimensional game controller with force feedback. In addition, the mostly proprietary world of virtual worlds needs to embrace common standards so that, for example, avatars from one world can enter another, Rattner said.
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The creator of OpenLaszlo plans to create a line of collaboration applications.
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Despite the recent failure of a Second Life-based virtual bank, financial experiments continue in the popular virtual world. The latest: A Singapore-based credit card you can use within Second Life.
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DALLAS, Texas - Taking a step into the new frontier, NASA Ames Research Center, under the direction of Simon &quot;Pete&quot; Worden, has launched an island in Second Life, an online 3-D virtual world created, shaped, and owned by its participants.
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The French location services firm likes the 'bird's eye view' offered in Virtual Earth.
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The basic technology is called voice-over-IP and it is referred to as VOIP. Free! Sign up here to receive our SiteWatcher e-Newsletter!
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AI vendor is set to show how it will use humans in virtual worlds to update the capabilities of its software.
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Retailers and manufacturers are setting up shop in Second Life, the three-dimensional online world, hoping that users will steer their avatars to real world stores.