Vivox to Lipsync: No voice for you
By Eric Reuters
Vivox executives told Reuters at the Virtual Worlds Conference there’s no plan to open access to Second Life’s voice stream to external developers, limiting the practical usefulness of planned “lipsync” technology.
Vivox created the technology that drives the voice chat feature in several virtual worlds, including Second Life but also EVE Online and the planned Sony@Home. The developers behind “lipsync” invented a means to make an avatar’s mouth move in rhythm to its voice, but they cannot make an avatar’s mouth move realistically because they lack direct access to the Vivox voice steam. As a result, the planned Lipsync technology creates an effect similar to watching a movie dubbed over in a foreign language.
Lipsync technology is slated for eventual inclusion into the main Second Life viewer.
“We’re keen on integrating lip-sync, though it’s held up on some implementation details on our end right now so there’s no particular time frame,” Tofu Linden told Reuters in Second Life.
Vivox spokesmen acknowledged that avatar lip movements which properly matched speech would greatly enhance the virtual world experience, and said they hoped that feature would come with the eventual widespread adoption of “3D cameras.”
For a company that seems to want to push the image that they “promote” open source they seem to keep hitting themselves in the balls in terms of technology choices.
The client keeps having more binary blobs thrown into it. Fist the FMOD audio layer and jpeg2000. Now we have this voice executable that runs beside the client. They continued with the proprietary physics library Havok4 when there are a variety of open source libraries like bullet.
I guess the lindens will continue to throw out real work to third parties while transaction issues continue to affect the economy seemingly every day.
Thu Apr 3, 2008 3:04pm PDTThis is actually incorrect, Vivox is actively looking at technology to incorporate the lipsync capability. Though not presently supported, we do have plans for this. We’re looking forward to working more with Linden and the Second Life community in making voice more intrinsic and customized.
Fri Apr 4, 2008 5:04am PDT