Written 6 April, 2007
Five-Way
Sweetie and I were involved in a five-way last night.
It’s not what you think.
It was a five-way Skype conversation, with participants fround all around the world. It was way fun.
See, I told you it’s not what you thought. You must get your mind out of the gutter!
We helped our friend Boofhead Oh, who happens to live in Australia in a little town very much like mine in Atlanta, download and install the Skype software. Soon we were talking. Sweetie sounded wonderful on her new $300 microphone. But then she would have sounded wonderful on the other end of a tin-can telephone.
Then DavidNC Merlin checked in. David lives in Nottingham, which, my other friend Aldo Zond tells me, is full of eccentric people. In Second Life, David is a question-asking, comment-making, script-tweaking machine; his av looks like Buddy Holly on speed. He was much less hyper in voice.
David chanced by Pele a couple of weeks ago and we became friends. He found to his delight that he lived in the next sim; he has a nice 4096 with a flexible banner of his Austrian girlfriend. David wasted no time. He got lucky only a few days in.
Then my brother Mordecai checked in next. He and I had planned to Skype, but I was already in conference when he phoned. So I teleported him in, started a new conference call, and we were in the aforesaid five-way.
And Mordecai taxied in his Mistress, Maia, and jumped on the couch with her and they were probably doing all sorts of unmentionable things while he was in the five way.
Although he was strangely quiet for a while.
hehehe
It was a fun time. When it was mentioned in conversation that it was possible to run more than one copy of the Second Life client simultaneously, DavidNC went to the URL I gave him to find out how. Shortly afterward, he teleported in his female alt. No one will ever guess it’s him, since she is cleverly named Davinda Merlin. She promptly announced that it was her intention to be a ho.
And she proved it by locking herself in an embrace with the unsuspecting DavidNC.
Which is pretty strange if you think about it.
Dakota rezzed about that time and promptly pronounced it a superior form of onanism.
Dakota doesn’t have a Skype account—but I’m working on her voice so it will be distinct from mine when voice comes to Second Life.
Last night it was almost as if voice had arrived.
Photos: Photos? Of Skype?
4 comments:
You might want to check out "Voice morphing" on Google. It is a technique initially developed for - surprise surprise - the military, but now becomes more and more available to the public (in a watered down form of course). When voice got introduced into the major IM networks, and when MMROPG's with voice (like WoW) became more popular, there was - quite naturally - a bigger demand for voice morphing.
Last time I checked it (*blush*) it was not really convincing, but that's a while ago and there's some determined minds behind it and some money to be made. So I assume it's getting better with each revision.
- Peter Stindberg
Actually, that wasn't what I first thought of... but then, I read the Lensman series when I was in high school. :)
Melissa, you read those books? I have an old Lensman paperback and I didn't get more than two pages into it.
I've listened to some of the voice morphing software. It seems they're a few years away from it being undetectable-- but it may well be that people in Second Life are happy to be deceived.
Perhaps there's hope for the escord industry after all.
Yup, I read them. Yes, they're seriously dated, the prose bombastic (though Smith clearly had a sense of humor; the sample of "Sybly White"'s SF story in Children of the Lens pokes gentle fun at his own style)... but, technology issues aside, it's only old to us now because Smith pioneered space opera and so many others plowed the ground he broke. (Heinlein's tribute to Smith puts it better than I can.)
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