Connecting the Real to the Virtual: Phone Calls from Second Life

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Have you ever wanted to communicate with your friends in the first life while you’re living your Second Life (no neither have we)? BT has created AvaTalk that allows you to easily communicate with friends and family all over the world without leaving your Second Life.

BT AvaTalk is a trial service that allows user's of Second Life to connect a chosen real phone and another real phone free of charge. It also includes the ability to send free SMS to mobiles around the world from an Avatar while in Second Life.

The system can be used in two ways, either from BT AvaTalk Phone Boxes that you can find at specific locations or via BT AvaTalk Head Up Display that you can be attached to your Avatar

The movie below provides full details into a service that we cant quite understand - sure the main pull is that its free, but take away the free aspect and why would you ever want to call someone in the 'real world' from Second Life rather than just use a 'real' phone on your desk or a service such as Skype?

We tend to get a bit of flack at times for using Second Life in our research, but we fully believe that there is a strong argument for these collaborative environments in the realm of geographic and architectural visualisation. However, we still cant see why we would want to pick up the phone in Second Life to ring someone, as we obviously are not actually in the environment.

Perhaps we are missing something on this one...

See http://www.btavatalk.com/about.htm for more info.