The Daily Graze has an enthusiastic report on the demo of Vivox’s VoIP technology being integrated into Second Life at last week’s Game Developer’s Conference.

We’ve recently reported on the trend of adding VoIP calling features to some of the popular game consoles and systems (Xbox, PSP), but Second Life really represents a whole new world of opportunity. Described by its creators as “a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents,” there are a lot of fascinating aspects to Second Life, not the least of which are the burgeoning economies and actual online businesses that are cropping up in this virtual world.

Vivox has developed both a phone booth and HUD versions of their VoIP phones that work in Second Life. Chris from the Daily Graze was quite impressed with the integration which included proximity-based voice chat for communication between Second Lifers as well as Second Life to Real Life (RL) phone calling. But that’s just the tip of the potential iceberg. As Chris notes:

Another interesting use of Vivox in SL will be as a branded VOIP portal. If a company buys 10,000 minutes of SL to RL calls and puts a branded phone booth on their island, they will draw both traffic and good will from residents who want to make free phone calls from SL. There are a lot of interesting possibilties here.