As we head towards the final deployment of 'bHear' or voice (we'll call it bHear for simplicity further down) in the official viewer (possibly as soon as next week or the week after, depending on which sources you listen to), debate is getting stronger - not on anything to do with the segregative issues surrounding text and voice, but on a rather more interesting practical and psychological effect: The user interface cutting you off from the virtual world.
If you're a heavy IM user, you'll know that you can log in, and spend several hours just answering IMs. You might not move around much during that period, but you can. Keep the IM window tucked somewhere handy, sort the IM tabs, so the most active ones are near the end, watch for them blinking, pay attention to local chat.
Fielding 20 or 30 conversations while doing other things in-world is slow, but still quite possible. The interface is more or less designed to let you. Your communication is a part of your virtual world experience.
The contention at the moment is, that bHear's unified communications panel pulls the communications out of the virtual world experience, and puts it all into a monolithic window, that hides the world from you, as well as requiring more mouse-clicks to navigate. Communications-heavy bHear users are increasingly less likely to experience the world around them, they tell us. That communications user-interface (currently known as chatterbox) hangs in the way like a separate application. One bHear user suggested that it was like having to ALT-TAB between Second Life and Skype all the time, dividing the experience of the world from communications.
Matthew Dowd wrote, "The new UI seems very much driven by the idea of "lets create a skype like application within the SL viewer" and as a result it starts segregating these different components of communication and breaks the unity between them; worse it enforces this separation onto the user rather than providing an experience where the user moves naturally between them without even noticing - and for me, that goes against the entire philosophy behind virtual 3D environments."
Discussions about the user-interface for bHear are just starting to hot up on the Second Life developer's mailing list. Nearly everyone agrees that the new communications interface has some good ideas, but also that it needs a complete reworking - However, from comments made by Philip Rosedale last week, it seems that he, at least, is expecting bHear to go live in the next week or two, and Linden Lab developers seem to feel an urgent need to merge the bHear branch with the main branch to reduce a lot of wasted duplicate effort.
Is it already too late to rework that user-interface before bHear hits the virtual streets (and maybe makes them hard to see)?
Update: Issue VWR-1076 in the public JIRA is for tracking and aggregating suggestions for fixing the chatterbox UI. It's already attracted 117 votes.
1. but voice is gonna save the world, right?
Posted at 11:08AM on Aug 2nd 2007 by Nobody Fugazi