During the last meeting with the management of Linden Lab to which I was invited and in which the excellent Project Zero was presented, I asked a question that was quite off topic (but also not, basically we were talking about the evolution of Second Life) to Philip Rosedale regarding a possible and necessary development of audio in Second Life.
Why did I ask him of all people present at meeting?
Maybe someone remembers the virtual world he created some time ago, High Fidelity. Now this virtual world is no more (plans for gatherings on the High Fidelity platform to use virtual reality were scrapped by the beginning of 2019, and the platform became audio-only) and High Fidelity takes care of Advanced Audio Processing quite well, as the name announced from the beginning.
You can listen to some examples on the High Fidelity site, and the approach seems right suited to Second Life, both for Voice, and for the musicians, and for the environmental sounds.
Wear your headphones and try this to understand the topic, for example.
Pretty impressive, right? No, no one is knocking on your door 🙂
I remember that during the development of Sansar Linden Lab had started an approach regarding spatial and 3D, volumetric, audio. I don’t know if this experiment with ambisonic sounds was implemented in the final version, it’s been a long time since I visited Sansar. The conditions were very interesting and everyone ran to buy ambient microphones.
But, seeing Rosedale on the other side of screen, I had to ask.
I put on my poker face and asked directly.
“Excuse me Philip, maybe we can hope in the future to have a developement of Second Life on Spatial Audio?”
He looked surprised and responded immediately. After that I was the surprised one, because he didn’t say no but was open to possibilities.
Audio is one of the most primitive areas of Second Life: ambiental sounds for now are based on a mere support for small audio files (max 30 second each, in mono…) to be imported one by one and with some work assembled with scripting, far from what it is possible to obtain today and if you have watched the example video you can quite simply understand what would be possible instead.
I will not fail to remind us of this quasi-promise whenever possible, that would be wonderful, for musicians but for any user of Second Life.
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