Vivox Porting SDK to PS3, Looks to Join Games and Virtual Worlds

Vivox is heading to the Playstation 3 with official blessing from Sony, Monty Sharma, Vice President, Product Management and co-Founder of Vivox, told me this afternoon.  Developers, including Sony Online Entertainment which previously added Vivox to its online PC games, will soon be able to make use of Vivox's software development kit for integrated voice on the Playstation 3. However, Sharma declined to say whether Vivox would eventually appear in the PS3's upcoming console-based virtual world, Home, only saying that, "You can hope."

The news may still be of interest to virtual worlders. Sharma says that he's seeing movement from more and more games towards virtual worlds and vice versa.

"There’s a number of upcoming games that SOE is developing they want voice for, DC Universe Online and others," said Sharma. "The other side that we’re seeing is this whole sandbox mentality of gamers wanting this more free experience: ‘I want to climb the mountain and see what’s on the other side.’ That’s heading in the virtual worlds direction, and then virtual worlds developers are seeing the need to give more content and action for people to have things to do. I can see a real moving to the center and blurring of lines for these sorts of things."

One goal of Vivox is to bridge those environments. Integrated voice is already part of Sony Launcher, a service for SOE's online games, and Sharma says that eventually Launcher will connect users across games. His hope is to continue the expansion to other environments.

"We’ve shown you SLim," said Sharma of the Second Life voice and IM client launched earlier this month. "Sony Launcher will do that for all their games. One of the things that will help to do is to bridge those environments, whether I’m in a Sony game or in some virtual world, I want to be able to talk to all of my friends."

The goal is to tie the service together on the network, letting users chat with friends whether through SLim, Sony Launcher, or directly from their games. Sharma expects some of the development to come from Vivox's recently announced Open Initiative, encouraging developers to take adaptation into their own hands.

It sounds almost like interoperability to me (or at least a step in that direction), which for virtual worlds has come up against problems both technological and motivational. Sharma says that sharing voice between worlds is simpler than porting avatars across boundaries, and, more importantly, that developers are actually interested in letting their users tie in to other virtual worlds and games.

"I just want to talk to this person. If you don’t let me talk to them, I’ll close this game and start that game or leave this virtual world and go to that virtual world. And that doesn’t make any sense," he explained. "So we’ve actually had very good receptivity from developers saying, ‘Yeah, we’d be interested in opening up for that.’ So hopefully we’ll have some announcements about that in the future and make it easier to find their friends anywhere."

Comments

[Veeyawn Spoonhammer]

Now if only we could get them to focus on SL Linux client support. That would be something.