The term "vox populi," can be defined as "voice of the people". It's a useful little phrase, because it's common sense that people talk everywhere and in different ways. They chat in an animated manner at parties, converse seriously at business conferences, whisper conspiratorially in the girls' locker rooms, and on and on. Yet, "the people" are silent in most massively multiplayer online (MMO) games where hordes of players gather, unless you count the click-clack of keys to type text to one another.

Enter Vivox, an upstart company with a deep background in the telecommunications field that believes they have a chance to step in, to evolve the MMO gaming experience to a new level of community interaction and personalization.

I had the chance to meet with Monty Sharma, Founder and VP of Product Management & Marketing for Vivox, in the quiet before the storm of the Game Developers Conference. Vivox and Sharma are at the GDC to promote their unique communications solutions to the developer community and the media, to showcase an independently-produced tech demo with Linden Labs' Second Life, and to make an announcement on Monday regarding an MMO title that has fully incorporated their service into the game play.

What Vivox brings to the MMO gaming table is a communications solution is known as "Immersion", which is the quality they hopes players will experience when exploring a Vivox-integrated game. Immersion is slated to offer persistent voice chat for guilds and general chat areas and dynamic voice chat for instanced experiences like quests and raids. The dynamic voice chat experiences promise the most interest applications of what Immersion can do: the Clubhouse is a set-aside casual social channel where players can chat about out-of-game topics. The Bar Stool is focused more on smaller group communication. All of these channels are completely customizable through the use of flags that can be activated or deactivated – from the number of participants, the permitted gender make-up, class, race, or by almost any user-definable criteria -- by gamers, administrators, game managers, or whoever is allowed to call the shots. Immersion promises to be more than just for chatterboxes, there's room for the typists too. The Instant Messaging features offer players access to their friends and family through a client that can access the Yahoo, MSN and AIM messenger mainstays; group chat; and through a chat client branded for the client's game, that can access in-game chat or external chat networks.

Beyond features alone, Vivox's Immersion solution is fueled by an industrial-strength and practically limitless scalable telecom infrastructure to support their products and services, which permit intensive instant messaging and audio communications capabilities to be embedded in, say, MMO games. "We're talking about a new kind of scale, with no practical limits on the numbers of users," Sharma explained, detailing how their independently-managed and run backbone could support as many as millions of players on voice and instant messaging, without adding any bandwidth burdens to the performance of these online games. With a game developer's view in mind, adding Vivox features to a game is described as a relatively painless process, through a simple plug-and-play API.

It would be easy to categorize Vivox as just one more entry in the growing pool field of in-game voice and chat services such as XFire, TeamSpeak and others. However, Sharma points out the differences he sees between Immersion and its competition: the aforementioned strength and scalability of the infrastructure, the high-quality 40 kHz voice codec which does not compress voice and therefore doesn't tax any processing through the delivery pipelines, and the customizability of the audio experience. They offer similar communications capabilities and limited integration with the game-play experience itself, Sharma maintains.

To make the case for what Vivox is capable of, Sharma logged into a test area in Second Life on his laptop to demonstrate an audio technology demo. The environment was a bustling restaurant, where the wireless broadband connection was not ideal. That said, I donned a pair of headphones and listed as Sharma's character walked to an in-game phone booth and punched the digits to his own cell phone, which then promptly rang. Using VoIP calling like other Internet telephony services such as Vonage, Sharma blurred the line between in-game and real-world communications. After that, the avatar was walked into a nearby room, where another Vivox developer was lounging on a couch as a character. Using the laptop microphone, Sharma and I were able to carry on a conversation with him at roughly the quality of a land line phone.

Even though several MMO game titles, such as Dungeons and Dragons Online and Auto Assault, already include or plan to include real-time audio communications, Sharma doesn't view it as competition but as a positive sign the industry is ready for Vivox audio solutions – which won't add overhead to a game's bandwidth needs and offer more scalability and customizability, he adds.

Looking ahead, Vivox sees a wide open future for MMO gaming, when it comes to the importance of audio as more than a passive ambient feature. Graphics have always been the alpha male quality in almost any game since the dawn of interactive entertainment, with audio a distant runner-up in most games. "You can add a lot of great functionality into a (community-oriented) game developed with audio in mind," Sharma asserts. "Voice will become that important a few generations of games from now." One particularly interesting addition planned for the future of Immersion is voice fonts, which is a fun way of describing creative real-time voice transformations into a representation of a player's race or class in their respective game. A female elf could speak in a game and you might hear the gruff voice of a 50 year-old male iron worker from the East Coast. Moments like that definitely take other players out of the game. A voice font would alter the tone and pitch to better simulate the higher tonal register of a female character, regardless of the gender of the player.

In the gaming world, Vivox seeks nothing less than to reinvent the possibilities for real-time communications in massively multiplayer online games. These are ambitious goals by anyone's standards, but Vivox has a chance to have its voice clearly heard.

Written by Paul Philleo