IBM, Linden Labs Call For Portable Avatars

destinyland writes "IBM just announced a push for universal avatars with Second Life's creator Linden Labs. Then they joined Google, Cisco, Intel, Sony, Microsoft, and Motorola for the first planning session on how to make it happen. There's already speculation that Google is working on a 3-D social networking environment incorporating Google Earth and Google Maps." Virtual Worlds News has up a copy of the joint press release.

A little too specific...

[parcel]

TFA doesn't say much, but it seems like this would end up a lot like Miis... where whatever style they chose for the avatars would only work in certain scenarios. I suppose they could make a more generalized system which would then be translated to whatever format "fits", but it seems like it would end up too generalized to really be useful.

Just what we need

[The_Mystic_For_Real]

More ways to trace you online, from the guys that brought online stalking to the mainstream.

Different identification at different sites cuts down on spamming, trolling, phishing, everything bad out there.

Can it be executed?

[kevmatic]

It would be a neat idea to "walk though a portal" in one MMO game and walk out another, but that obviously would require you to install both games, anyway.

And having the same appearance in all games? Would anyone even WANT that? Where's the variety? I'm guessing that your avatar is transmitted by metadata (your eyes are GREEN and x big) ala Spore, but all you're saving then is the creation of the character, and it could end up wrong without hand-adjusting it. I don't think that you could carry things like clothing and armor over, so you'd just end up with different avatar with the same face.

And you couldn't carry over in-game data (like what level you are in an RPG) unless everyone used the same basic battle engine.

Might have a bit of use in different "Second lives," but you're gonna end up linking economies such that you end up with essentially one giant world economy with exchange rates. I guess that's the idea.

I dunno, I think its going to either make all the games seem the same, or end up carrying over very little.

Suprising that SL would go for it.

[Jartan]

SL's whole business model relies on an artificial land scarcity system to basically heavily overcharge for independent server hosting costs. I'll be surprised if they truly open the system up to another system that lacks artificial land scarcity.

Not MMORPG

[Bellum Aeternus]

IBM has been investing a VR business trainer with the concept it'll be something like Star Trek's holodeck (except seen through a PC screen). Since they've been focusing on representing the real world, I doubt they've even considered porting your World of WarCraft character into their world. More than likely, they're looking for a standard to reduce their cost of R&D and to help spread the concept.

Like Myspace... in 3-D

[ivormi]

It hits the other virtual worlds -- World of Warcraft? Quake? Maybe it'll even stomp through Google Earth.

Is it just me that feels like this would generally be a bad idea visually? Ignoring the technological problems of trying to scale a universal 3d figure and textures to suit a particular rendering engine, it just seems like a bad choice artistically. The cute and cartoony Miis would be a poor fit in Second Life, and the 'realistic' figures in Second Life or the Sims would look pretty silly next to the thick macho characters in Gears of War.

A large part of 3-D worlds is the consistency of the artistic presentation, be that Wii sports, World of Warcraft, or Bioshock. To give that up also gives up a large part of what makes these worlds compelling to us.

Re:Can it be executed?

[kevmatic]

You're equating Real Life and Virtual Life too tightly, and are throwing the technical aspects out the window, so yeah, bad analogy.

Let me ask you this: Are you going to download gigabytes and/or buy a game just to visit it for a few hours? No, you're gonna buy it to put time into it. And if its just like the game you already bought besides basic appearances, you're just gonna keep playing the first. Traveling and looking at stuff gets a tiresome a lot faster on a monitor than real life.

Its not just currency, too, like in the EU. There's all the landscapes and places to see in Europe. Are you going to buy a game just for that? If you make the games much more different than that, your avatar isn't going to carry much over. A Money Exchange would be far easier to implement than whole avatar sharing. I'm not sure even that's a good idea; you don't want a glitch in one game (say a reproduction glitch) to destroy the economy in dozens of games.

They seem to be smarter then DEC

[argent]

DEC systematically avoided extending their systems into the personal computer world, and overcharged when they did, so that despite the fact that virtually all the personal computer platforms in use today have descended from DEC systems[1] or were developed on DEC hardware[2], DEC was swallowed up whole by a personal computer company and virtually lost as the corpse of Compaq was digested by HP.

Linden Labs has to either adapt to an open virtual world environment someone else comes up with, or drive the development of the open environment themselves. They seem to be making the choice of leading the charge instead of waiting to be run over.

[1] CP/M is much like an RSX-11/RT-11 lookalike, and MS-DOS and Windows inherit that. NT was designed by the principle architect of VMS and RSX.
[2] UNIX of course grew to maturity on the PDP-11 and the VAX.