Where Voice Chat Helps
New Media Consortium staff held a meeting in Second Life. One of the staffers makes a good case for why audio chat is more effective for some things than text:
Most communication in SL is via a text chat, where anyone in proximity can see what you have to “say”. Chat comes with its own mode of communication, abbreviations, typos, but most noticeable, the overhead of focusing on the keyboard. On the “NMC Island” we are also using TeamSpeak, a server based audio application that allows us to create “channels” where we can communicate via audio in an external application, and the channels are associate with different “places”. We have also used some Skype conferencing and it makes a huge difference to be able to have audio communication “why do I keep flying into the ceiling?”, “Which way is the meeting room?”, “Why is your skin so blue?” that is better as you can focus your concentration in the navigation and interaction, not typing conversations.
Since Croquet has audio chat built in, it’s much easier to do this kind of integration and more.