“As we think about the future of communication in the metaverse, we think that it needs to be very natural and feel very similar to the way we communicate in the real world,” Roblox Chief Product Officer Manuel Bronstein told TechCrunch in an interview. To have a private conversation with a nearby friend, you might peel off and walk toward a store down the block. But you wouldn’t be able to hear someone walking around on the sidewalk across the street, since they’re too far away. Say you’re hanging out in a virtual skatepark in Roblox with spatial audio enabled: skaters in the halfpipe with you would sound loud and clear, just like they would in real life.
Roblox sees its new voice product as a natural extension of the way that text chat works now, but instead of text bubbles that pop up over an avatar’s head, visible to anybody around them, players will be able to talk naturally to the other people they bump into. With spatial voice, users will be able to speak with other people nearby through live voice chat.
The first move: inviting a group of trusted developers to explore how they can integrate proximity-based audio into the wildly popular experiences that beat at the heart of the platform - from chill, vaporwavey vibe games to pulling off kickflips in a Vans-sponsored skate park. To that end, Roblox is taking careful but decisive steps toward weaving voice chat into the platform’s core experience. And while the platform has had no shortage of growth on its current path - as of July, it boasted 47 million daily active users - it’s looking to chart a course toward deeper, richer virtual experiences that will keep people coming back for years to come. As one of the frontrunners in the race to build the metaverse, Roblox is thinking ahead to what virtual worlds really need.
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