I have now decided to use Photon’s suite of services to drive both Audio and Text chat. Photon provides both the server backend and Unity plugins for implementing voice and chat texts. The service is free for under 20 concurrent users, so there’s no problem there.

I think I will try to stick with the card UI language, but I may experiment with a 3D manifestation like this walkie-talkie I sketched up. It would be cool to have a physical (virtual) object that would have a 3D sound layer when you brought it up to your ear, more of like a binaural sound than just hearing it from a source in front of you, much like the phone in Job Simulator. I would imagine that the indicator light on the top would light up when you have a new message and putting it up to your ear would play the message. The trigger on the back would enable the player to record a message or directly talk back. The Vive and Oculus CV1 both have microphones by the face, so it would be quite easy to record the voice.

Concept for a walkie-talkie

I am currently in the process of setting up Photon and modeling the the walkie-talkie above to act as the point of interaction for the voice and am also trying to work out a way to adapt the custom emoji support in Photon to act as a quick way to send large emoji to another person.