MOGD reports on a new Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) application that should challenge the boundary between real and virtual. When implemented in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game, it will allow avatars to phone out of the world to offline friends and relations.
What Vivox brings to the MMO gaming table is a communications solution is known as "Immersion", which is the quality they hopes players will experience when exploring a Vivox-integrated game. ... I donned a pair of headphones and listed as Sharma's character walked to an in-game phone booth and punched the digits to his own cell phone, which then promptly rang. Using VoIP calling like other Internet telephony services such as Vonage, Sharma blurred the line between in-game and real-world communications. After that, the avatar was walked into a nearby room, where another Vivox developer was lounging on a couch as a character. Using the laptop microphone, Sharma and I were able to carry on a conversation with him at roughly the quality of a land line phone.
VoIP has been on the cards for a number of online games, most of which only feature text-based communication. VoIP over other connected services, like Xbox or PlayStation 2, have added new dimensions of gaming for players (as well as irritating many others).
As the article says,
"You can add a lot of great functionality into a (community-oriented) game developed with audio in mind," Sharma asserts. "Voice will become that important a few generations of games from now."
