3pointD.com

The Smart Internet Technology Cooperative Research Centre in Australia is bringing positional voice and audio to online games and 3D virtual spaces. Its Immersive Communications Environment will represent environmental audio and users’ voices positionally: the gamers and gunshots that are closer to you will sound louder, while those that are further away will sound fainter or won’t be heard at all. For gamers, this is a step forward in games like World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike, and could add a great deal to virtual worlds like Second Life and There.com, for those who care to adopt it. The system can only support around 1,000 users per server at the moment, but for most conversations and contexts, that will be more than enough. It doesn’t seem to be commercially available at the moment, but I’m betting it’s only a matter of time. I definitely want to hear my guildies’ voices echoing down the halls of WoW instances in a positional, directional way, rather than just everyone shouting at once. [Via Glitchy.]