3pointD.com

Second Life’s first voice-enabled Town Hall meeting, featuring Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, is now available for listening or download at this link. Some highlights after the jump.

• On why recent new features have not been drawn from the Feature Voting tool that was made available to residents last year: LL is concentrating on bug fixes and reducing the crash rate. Recent new features have supported that effort.

• On when residents can expect SL to upgrade to the Havok 2 physics engine: “There are not enough immediate improvements in Havok 2 to push it into development ahead of some of the bug fixes and other things we’re doing.”

• “We are continuing to move toward an open-source model for the SL code.”

• The average frame-rate users get from Second Life is around 15 frames per second. It needs to be above 15 fps for everyone, Philip says.

And that’s just from the first half of the meeting. Aside from what was discussed, it’s significant that LL has begun holding their Town Halls as voice meetings instead of in text chat. Interestingly, many SL residents have reacted negatively to the prospect of bringing voice into their virtual world, both because it may discriminate against the hearing-impaired, and out of concern for those residents who prefer to keep their real-life identities to themselves. To address the first concern, LL’s Robin Harper relayed Philip’s comments live via text chat to the audience. To address the second, LL will make a transcript of the Town Hall available to residents — though it probably won’t be up for another 48 hours.