Innovative service or new cash grab?
On June 10th Linden Labs announced a new service feature on it’s community blog (click here for the official release) that would enable users to “voice morph” or change the sound of their avatars voice in Second Life.
Residents can go to sample various styles of demos for free and then select the package of voice options that suits them best from an in-world vending machine. The subscription rate for maintaining your “voice morphing” service is $750L per month. Click here to teleport in world to the location.
The ability to change one’s voice in Second Life will definitely be a benefit to the theater community and actors will not need to be limited by gender. Women will be able to assume male roles (and vice versa) with a quality voice over. That could be extremely helpful for understudies as well and a great assistance to in-world productions.
But the ability to “gender bend” or disguise voice also brings up other ethical issues. Individuals can be “stalked” in Second Life and previously the best weapon in combating identity misrepresentation has been to request a voice conversation. How are we supposed to differentiate now? Request a video conference via Skype?
Identity misrepresentation is a serious problem in Second Life. It’s likely that the product will be highly subscribed by both the career “grief-er” and the classic “stalker”. What Linden Lab plans to do to protect people from being victimized by this is unclear however we anticipate the arrival of IP verification soon to address the issue.
While the product is an exciting offering it is questionable why Linden Lab would choose to make it at an additional cost. Second Life is rapidly becoming a pay-per-use platform. Adding an exciting feature like the “voice morphing” had the potential to make Linden Lab customers happy by offering another free value added service to enhance the users experience. It could have also been marketed as a free service for members with Premium Accounts. What a great way to boost enrollment for the Lab.
However, a monthly subscription to the service may appear to be yet another “cash grab” by Linden Lab at a time when many users are feeling dejected by the commerce limiting changes to the Terms of Service (TOS) and staffing layoffs and legal suits filed against the platform provider. Arguably despite Mark Kingdon’s assurances (CEO of Linden Lab) that everything is performing optimally this seems to be a very bad time to promote another fee based product.
Making Second Life more expensive to “live in” or providing a really innovative service on a pricey monthly subscription may appear to be contrary to the goal to drive new user recruitment rates up and level off the attrition rate of long term users migrating to other virtual worlds.
If an add-on fee based system is the direction that Linden Lab decides to go the virtual world may face a rapid decline in population and profitability.
After all an empty grid pays no lindens.
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Source: Web June 11, 2010
http://blogs.secondlife.com
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Dousa Dragonash
The voice morphing feature in the latest beta SL viewer is intriguing, and when I first entered SL over a year ago, I wondered if I should get my voice morphed to fit the personality of the angel bear character I brought into this virtual world. At the time, no affordable voice morpher was available to me, so I started my career as a stand-up comic with my voice unaltered.
By now, my voice is probably very recognizable as being that of Skye Vanistok, and it would probably be very fruitless to mess with it in any way, shape, or form.
June 24, 2010 | 2:04 pm