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.

Re:Just what we need

[ILuvRamen]

you got that right. You know how many ppl would be dumb enough to put their real, actual location that they live at in on google maps and earth. Then when they piss somebody with no life and anger management problems off, they can print off directions to their house.

Re:Just what we need

[garcia]

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

Well, Social Networking and Web 2.0 is a huge recruiting tool for every marketer and especially post-secondary institutions. CRM solutions and colleges themselves are scrambling on how to embrace this technology and make a buck off of it. Unfortunately, these services don't have any real unique identifier (OpenID?) that people can track the success of their campaigns to market from the inside out.

If they are really looking to do some more serious online stalking and to make a buck, they should be less concerned with these mobile avatars and more concerned with creating an identifier (like the Google Account I guess) that is trackable throughout all systems on the web so that third parties can effectively market to the people that want to be marketed to via their communication channel of choice...

Nice in theory, unlikely for some time in practice

[kbonin]

For clients as graphically primitive as SecondLife, this is a relatively straightforward task of publishing a simple texture & mesh specification. But if you want to push things to support more complex graphics and more efficient avatar and object systems, you quickly step deep into implementation specific issues that generally kill efficiency across implementations.

I worked in games tools and engines for almost 20 years, with years of art path work and a focus on avatars and interoperability, and frankly the more efficient you design your system, the harder it is to describe it in simplistic generic terms. Add vested interests and committees, and you are likely to get a repeat of VRML - one company railroads the process to accept their spec, which hobbles progress forever.

Shameless plug: I've also been working for over a decade on massively multiplayer vr & games over p2p, something that will come online this year as proprietary, but move to open source once our small group leverages our first mover advantages. Our website doesn't show it yet, but the underlying tech is at least a generation past anything on the market to date - imagine a superset of Sims2 avatars and active objects with coding interfaces in Python and C++, in-engine collaborative editing of the world, open art import paths, integrated CreativeCommons rights, content rating, audio chat, all built on military grade crypto w/ Byzantine robustness. And we're always looking for more help, need more veteran programmers and human animators. http://www.vscape.com/ [vscape.com]

I did!

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody know how to log into to Slashdot using my AOL avatar?

Re:Tag this RainbowsEnd

[ColdWetDog]

But why does this all remind me of Snow Crash [wikipedia.org]? Or even William Gibson's [wikipedia.org] writings? It seems all to real....

Meta-Avatar

[Floritard]

I think a better system would be to develop some sort of Avatar language. Some common protocol for describing physical features. Reminds me of some online app I found somewhere that could pull a Mii character's appearance from a Wiimote and convert it into a string of characters for online editting and sharing. With such a format you could plug in your appearance meta-data and have a game create your face in its own style. And really it should be limited to facial features. The face is the most identifiable part of a character, and a player's body depends too much on the game's mechanics and art style. There is no guarantee that the player will even be humanoid in a particular game. Same goes for character apparel. There is usually a very narrow range of playable body types in any given gameplay model, unless we're just talking about MMORPGs and social sims where game physics usually play a very weak part.

That's probably the sort of games they're talking about anyway, and in that case it's not terribly interesting anyway. I'm in the minority of people who don't much care for those games, I'm more about action/adventure. I think it would be cool to be able to craft my face (parametrically) in some high-end photorealistic sport-sim, then flip over to a game like Puzzle Fighter and see how my mug translates in the big-head, big-eyes anime world. You could even stack on game specific optimizations, making your universal avatar signature more of a base-template. Something to get you going. I kind of wish Nintendo's Miis were a little more complex and more along these lines actually, though there's nothing really from stopping some innovative game company from doing just what I have described here in their game. "So you have blue eyes and a brown mop-top? Well here's how you look in our world."

True Names

[argent]

The first story that had a real "virtual world" feel - Vinge's True Names - has proven awfully visionary too. Including the newbies with the giant badly-rendered motorcycles. :)

Re:A little too specific...

[KDR_11k]

Transporting graphical data isn't the issue, making the avatar come out in a way that fits the new world is (e.g. can't take your phaser rifle into Everquest and with those shoes you aren't getting in, either. Never mind we have a strict "no Klingons" policy!). You could just duplicate the data between all engines with minor adjustments but realistically you don't want people who don't fit the environment. Of course Second Life can appreciate that, they have no coherent style anyway but nothing would ruin the atmosphere of a coherent game more than a furry invasion (unless the game was something like Conker: Online).