This week I noticed a sudden burst of news about development of the avatar. Technologyreview.com reports 3D agency DAZ Productions presented the ambitious plan to allow their users to create high detail avatars, and importing them into multiple virtual worlds. I think the single avatar identity, and consistency would really be a valuable contribution, however, 3D DAZ supports just the Multiverse platform right now but claims to add more in the near future.
Meanwhile, Second Life opened their website up to the ‘Weblins‘. Other members of Weblins get their avatar displayed on the actual page and can interact. In even more avatar news the developers of realXtend, a virtual world client based on the open source Second Life client keep raising the bar. They released a demo of their avatar creation and animations currently possible on their servers.
Another plan that was supposed to be looked at in 2008 according to this post on npirl (not Possible in Real Life) is Avatar Puppeteering - the ability to directly manipulate the avatars position, as comprehensively explained on this website by JJ Ventralla.
Bots & Artificial Intelligence
The next series of innovations show how avatars no longer need a human componment either. Botworld has created a Second Life avatar capable of talking (a chatbot and performing simple tasks), and a bot capable of playing hide and seek. Earlier this year Massively reported of Second Life developments showing an avatar with the artificial intelligence of a 4 year old, and just this week ‘Sine Wave’ owner Easy Babcock demonstrated the Sine Wave Actorbot System, a client running bots and controlling their actions and animations.
This last system seems quite extensive - as Easy explains: “A bot can be used for 1. Creating sessions - so that when it’s dealing with one person it doesn’t try and interact with someone else; 2. Changing outfits on command, and 3. Allowing users to trade and swap the routines they create, so people can build complex sales routines and so on, and everyone can build on them.”All of these things would obviously be a great addition to any of the empty sights in Second Life,and offer many possibilities for retail, education, gaming and even corporate use as the Personal Assistant.
Posted on: April 10, 2008 | Share on:
Abhishek Saxena on 
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Dale Innis
said on April 10th
Gad I must be getting old; I had to lie down after the camerawork on that realXtend video. :) Is it in fact the case that one couldn’t (if one was sufficiently skilled and motivated) produce those same moves using the existing SL BVH animations?
Rick van der Wal
said on April 10th
I’m not sure what BVHis to be honest but I have never seen anything like that in Second Life :) It could have something to do with the more extensive bone structure of the realXtend viewer:
realXtend’s Tony Manninen: “Our avatar will have enough “bones” for full facial expressions, etc. When the actual base architecture of the avatar is fully functional, there’s a possibility to use webcam, voice, or other input devices to control your avatars expressions. It can be true 1:1 mapping, but of course it can be something else as well. You can be yourself, or, you can change your “output” to something else.”
abc
said on April 10th
you see BVH all the time in SL, it’s the file format being used for animations.
Erin
said on April 10th
how can I tell if my avatar will work on Second life? I am new to this stuff. I built it here: http://nevacross.com/?utm_source=cdg&utm_medium=media&utm_campaign=blogging
Dale Innis
said on April 10th
You can’t import IMVU avatars into Second Life. At least not this month! :)
Rick van der Wal
said on April 10th
Hello Erin :)
Dale is right, you have created an avatar for a different virtual world which currently doesn’t mix with second life.
You can create your avatar for second life inside the virtual world. You can get second life at http://secondlife.com. Hope that helps!