Text My Avatar! Telecom Service Lets Residents Send/Receive Texts Through Their Avatar Names

This post needs a mammoth full disclosure right at the start, because the British telecom Vodafone has been an NWN advertiser for the last couple months, but in all honesty, this is a genuinely cool project I've been meaning to blog about since watching a demo presented by the company's project manager at a panel for the Virtual Worlds Forum I hosted.  Their InsideOut service links your mobile/cellphone number to your avatar, and once initialized, lets you text Residents from within SL.  The real magic is that when Residents also linked to the service send a text to you, it's received on your phone listing their avatar name. 

That way, you can send and receive texts without ever revealing anything besides your SL identity.  (As you can see above, in this text sent from Margaret RiversRunRed, Resident name of a lovely staffer with the UK metaverse development company that co-produced the project with Vodafone.

Still in Beta, it took several false starts to get it running smoothly on my cellphone, and it's still a bit clunky; also, though Margaret assures me that's not the case, I'm paranoid that receiving Second Life texts from non-US Residents will end up as a massive international penalty on my bill.  (But that's mainly a function of AT&T apparently being run by the devil.)  That aside, it's not hard to see the many possibilities, after avatar identities are moved from the metaverse into mobile phones-- and by extension, into the real world.

Comments

[Nexii Malthus]

Woah, sounds scarily like the project collaboration I was working with Storm Basiat to send SMS messages from within Second Life. I had previously successfully sent a SMS test message to a mobile phone from within Second Life and display the avatar name that sent it. Seems like Vodafone will be a viable competitor in the future when I transfer to the Main Grid.

[Trinity Hartunian]

I didn't understand how to get it to work. If anyone wants to add me and text me, go ahead. I thought this was supposed to be making calls too? Confused.

[ftajibp hebi]

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