Second Voice – Telephony In Virtual Worlds

I just posted my first contribution to O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony blog; a short piece on how voice applications might be added to Second Life. I’m thinking about some more articles exploring…

  • how mobility is changing social+cultural patterns and how current products and services don’t really assist.
  • some commentary on mobile product design, framed around Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity and handset innovations such as DigitWireless & NeoKeys.
  • speculative stuff about use of mobiles as distributed sensors…

Any more weird, left-field telephony ideas? Please lemme know 🙂

Comments

  1. Your posts on the ETel blog are spot-on, if your goal is to open up discussions. Two of the three you mention above have led to interesting discussions around our virtual office’s virtual water cooler. Keep up the good work.
    In the hopes you can stir up another discussion, what can you tell us about using mobile device locations to support a dynamic command and control structure? For example, if a taxi dispatcher makes a call request to a street address, a back-end application server could easily route the call to the nearest available taxi, based on presence and location info. Are you aware of any interesting work in this area?

    Reply
  2. Thanks Rick! I was worried that no one was commenting on my posts and whether they were useful to anyone…!
    I’ve seen some work along the lines of your description. I worked with some students at Milan’s Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) who conceptualised an on-demand public transportation service that routed buses and pedestrians to mutually beneficial pickup points. The project (‘Link Us’) was a study of presence, location, digital ID, and reputation. They didn’t build a service but developed some really quite viable use cases.

    Reply

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