VoIP on a Prim - Reactiongrid ft. Skype
February 17, 2009 10:32 pmI must admit, I hardly ever use the ‘voice facilities’ embedded in the Second Life client, often I even prevent that part of my client to launch itself*. I do talk in Second Life, though. For me, nothing beats the quality of having a Skype conversation, if needed illustrated with my avatar standing and pointing at things in the virtual world. Especially not if native Second Life voice conversations seems to suck, even when the persons on the other side of ‘the internetz’ actually takes the effort to set their microphone settings properly. Yeah, no voice gestures then, but I can live with that, if it saves me a headache.
Voice in OpenSim & ReactionGrid?
Up to now, both OpenSim and the Reactiongrid had no voice at all, so using Skype when I felt the urge to talk was the way to go. It might soon become the official way to go, as the Reactiongrid folks got the bright idea to activate Skype from within OpenSim to meet the need for voice.
“By modifying the OpenSim MSSQL 2008 database to associate UUID’s of avatars with Skype names or phone numbers we can now setup and initialize and even update with new inworld callers from a “voip on a prim” system.”
They are using Skype’s API to introduce VoIP on their server and in their client. Initial testing is going well, and Robin promises to release the code when done: “We fully plan to release the method back into the wild - all Opensim grids should benefit.”
But Skype is closed source?
Torrid Luna from primforge.com is correct when pointing out some of the drawbacks - no spatial info and a closed source and protocol - but _any_ voice will be a great start, until they can implement an ‘open’ solution such as there are Vivox’s Open initiative and Mumble.
Modular Integration?
There were already previous voice initiatives by RealXtend - a fork of OpenSim - (more on this at UgoTrade) and OpenLife, but none of these solutions were shared & adopted on a wide scale. Maybe the most reasonable voice in this discussion of which system & implementation of it to choose, comes from Mo Hax: “I suppose the biggest thing personally I would like to see, and that many expressed, would be modularity in voice integration allowing the sim owners and grid managers to select their preferred voice implementation. This increases competition and promotes the best solution in the long term.”
It all started on Twitter
If you enjoy reading 140 character conversations, take a look at the summary of the initial Twitter conversation on the Reactiongrid Forum.
* The client parameter that disables the voice application from launching together with your client is “–novoice”, without the quotation marks. Just glue that in the ‘target’ field of your Second Life client shortcut, as you do with OpenSim login parameters.
Image credit: Skype Inworld Conference Call System by ReactionGrid on Flickr.
10 Responses to “VoIP on a Prim - Reactiongrid ft. Skype”
Yup, Skype voice quality is by far much superior to SL voice quality. Dunno why, but that’s how things are. I’ve been testing Skype conferences of 10+ persons, and the quality is really outstanding — specially regarding automatic feedback cancellation algorithms. SL voice seems to lack these altogether. I remember taking one of these useless previous-to-log-in polls in the SL client ages ago — “would you love to have a flat voice mode?”, a way to hear everybody at the same level, irrespective of their distance — ideal for classrooms. They’ve done nothing in this respect. Well, now that you make me think about it, they’ve done nothing in any respect — except scamming us with OpenSpaces… :-P
Thanks Vint, for bringing my concerns from Twitter onto a real Blog! :-)
Regarding Skype: Skype is probably the darkest cube on the black box market, the so called API does not more than triggering an already running Skype application to initiate calls/chats etc.. Even the Skype boxes in serious VoIP are not more than headless Linux boxes running a bunch of Skyp0s and some virtual PCMs. Don’t get me wrong, Skype has a great quality, but any decent VoiP client can do that, with the right codec.
Regarding Spacial sound: I’ve been participating in the 2nd AWG meeting in Second Life, with like 70 Avatars, about 1/3 of them speaking over voice. And I was very happy to have that special spacial feature there: It’s barely impossible to keep apart more than 5-10 Speakers in a normal Voice conference, and it greatly helps to see the Avatar behind that voice. But for that, you first have to locate them.
That said, I’m super happy that @RobinG2 and @Dr_Manhattan are working on a Voice solution, and that will be a milestone for Opensim.
And now I’m off, to think about cheapo 3D mixing algorithms that get along without trigonometricks! ;-)
RealXtend has this kind of Skype support since more than half a year. It works fine but we prefer a fully integrated and open sourced solution:
Asterisk is already integrated in OpenSim, voipforvw replaces SLVoice and everything works fine. And because the asterisk server can connect to nearly everything joining a Skype conference is no problem at all. You can even use asterisk to call in/out from RL cellphones.
Nice article Vint - I’ll look forward to taking a look at this when it’s publicly released.
And of course, we’re looking forward to your review of it. *grins* That kinda sums up OpenSim, looking forward to all the kewl things still bound to happen. I gave up on that as it comes to Second Life. I’m still waiting for my roadmap. I’m still waiting for managing IM from web (SLim is -not- a solution) and I’m still waiting for my avatar telephone number. :d
(Skype should solve this problem also, as was pointed out on the blogs, would be nice to be able to do support from skype… , without necessarily having to be ‘on sim’ at that time.)
PS. is there an OpenSim roadmap? :D
What’s all this “asterix” stuff? I know the * and Obelix’ best friend, but never heard of it in relation to VoIP. Should I be blushing now?
Don’t worry! ;-)
Asterisk is a free and open source Telephony server (http://www.asterisk.org/). Just like the big cisco machines that cost several kUSD and need life long training, only cheaper. ;-) On one hand that software powers big VoIP companies, on the other hand a really tiny Asterisk is built into some of the home DSL routers for routing the phone through DSL instead of copper cable. Small but powerful, just like the Gaul^^
It would be really convenient to have that in Opensim, since you can route calls to real telephones, mobile or even Skype^^ (planned for Q1 2009), in both directions…
With Asterisk you could have Faxing, voice, interaction with DTMF devices, all to and from your Opensim.
The mind boggles :-)
Advantage of Skype is -you choose the respondee
and are not suddenly deafened by feedback and an idiot whistling the great escape out of tune.
I’ve disabled voice in SL now, life is quieter.
We have Asterisk with OpenSim working and use it sucessfully e. g. between Windows and Mac OSX viewers.
Beside the stable and already industry proven basic solution there is still plenty of work left to be done. But it is more the kind of optimization projects, the underlying technology has proven to be running fine.
Anybody interested in joining our project efforts or in sponsoring/donating to enhance development speed is herewith invited to contact our staff at info@talentraspel.de.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
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