The Evolution of the Avatar

Thoughts on virtual worlds: The evolution of the Avatar

The AVATAR is the fundamental element of a virtual world. Any environment that doesn't anchor a users identity to it will ultimately not anchor the user's interest. And when users are transitory there is no chance for community. You end up with virtual ghost towns.

The Avatar is the next evolution of the email address.

Email began in earnest with college usage as the universities were the first to have an internal internet structure, handed down from the military which created the first email protocols.

Email has now become the icon of digital identities... we are known more for our email address than our physical address... and our real location in the world at any given moment is now unimportant because our point of contact, email address, obeys very few boundaries.

Add to this the penchant for us to always try to expand our ability to be in-touch with other people and you have the birth of virtual environments like Second Life.* Virtual environments are the expression of us reaching for each other. If I know there are people in Sweden... then I WANT to know them! Not just talk to them but live with them... and if I can do that with my butt in a chair in Colorado...

I remember the early days of 3D software... watching NASA animations of what it might look like if a probe cruised over the surface of Mars. And the first thought I had was... I want to walk there. It wasn't enough to take a remote tour. I had to go there and stake out a spot of my own and go exploring. I can't get past the fact that, in my experience as a person, worlds are not about worlds, they are about ME in worlds.

So in virtual worlds it is always about the avatar. And recent years in virtual worlds have shown that by far the most tweaked, played-with, modified, upgraded, ... loved... thing in any virtual world is the user's avatar. It's our new point of contact in virtual worlds... can talk, walk, drink, dance and graced with scripting can dance and make love to other avatars in a remote imitation of our intimate real-world moments.

How then is the avatar going to evolve? We know it will, as we expand everything we can.

Work is already being done to brainstorm a set of standards that will allow avatars to cross the boundaries of virtual worlds. I can see a future where virtual environments will avoid the horrendous weight of trying to be all things to all people... they will specialize... universities will collaborate on funding educational environments designed to deliver high-levels of interaction and experiential learning at the expense of creating living spaces for avatars and businesses. Sports advocates will collaborate on fast-reaction-time worlds with hard-coded environments to make racing and sports simulation a possibility. Their constructs will forego the ability for individuals to customize anything but their avatars or vehicles so the response times of races can be video-game crisp.

And the broad-stroke environments like Second Life will have link nodes around the world for avatars to teleport to these specialized worlds for much higher-quality experiences. Racing and education and other specialized tasks will fade to a great degree from the social worlds and the social worlds will learn to specialize themselves... becoming ideally suited to personalized living spaces, and community-building.

But avatars themselves are always and ever the hub of all things and so they are destined to replace email as the icon of personal identity. In fact email will become a channel attached to the avatar, as well as websites, blogs, personal (secure) data... we'll do banking in virtual worlds... the first real use of video in our phones is likely to be the voice-directed lip-sync'd image of our avatars rather than our real faces. We love contact... but we also really love anonymity!

Because the software isn't here yet it's sometimes hard to picture but our 3D avatar is going to be an ever-present entity on our computer screens in the next decade. As easy to use as email is now and able to go places email never could. You think YouTube changed the face of film in the world... wait till serialized videos are produced by highly organized groups using only their avatars as actors. Code-writers will be rock stars in the coming decades. And so will personality.

In this new age, society has little tolerance for negativity or boredom. Now that your fantastic genetic curves are no longer your stock in trade your mind is going to need to be sharp to play with the big boys. Sharp, and gracious. Manners in virtual environments count as priceless where traditional boundaries don't exist and anonymity does. One foul-mouth comment and not only are you muted by the one you offended but what you said is now on the screens of 7 of their other friends. Or 700! A harsh introduction to the power of virtual groups.

We would do well to brace ourselves for a fairly dramatic shift in the way we think about our place in the world. Are you really as isolated as you think? Not for long you're not.

- Jeela Juran


* Some would argue that MySpace and Facebook are also virtual environments because they are hubs for digital communities but I would counter that they are better defined as CHANNELS. They DO grow in complexity and can expand the ways in which people communicate in them but, in a web-based environment, eventually the expansions of features become so hard to use that those features will never become ubiquitous. There's only so many ways you can upgrade a car before it has to become an airplane. :)