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Instant Messaging Goes Graphical
williampiv writes "For most of the millions of people around the world who regularly use instant messaging, the communications tool has largely been a text-only experience in which typed emoticons offer only minimal clues to someone's state of mind.
The recent launch of two services -- a brand new, fully three-dimensional chat-room product known as IMVU, and AOL Instant Messenger's new 3-D SuperBuddy icons -- is putting the spotlight on a major shift by the leading IM providers toward making graphical avatars a fundamental personalization feature."
Basically graphical chatrooms, or graphical IM, have been around for a while, in different guises.
However, will it actually add to the user experience? Will it improve comprehension and communication?
I herefore provide prior art for a system that will take readings frmo a human and transform them into human readable signs in a virtual avatar on a computer.
IE, you can smile, and you avatar will smile, you can get angry, and you avatar will become flustered also.
Hey there you go, might not be enough, but when these little things hit me, I just like to chisel down those 3000 patents to 2999.
maybe shareyourgoodidea.org should be created where all good ideas are copylefted and recorded with prior art and defended.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
My main problem concerning buddy icons and avatars and such is that the selections are simply too limited. I mean, sure, there's a few thousand to pick from, and even categorized, but still finding something that seems to fit me just doesn't happen. I imagine this will be far worse with a 3D avatar based system, since the selection will be much larger, and it just won't be possible for the average person to make their own (like they currently do with animated GIFs and such).
Also, it mentions charging for the service. I personally wouldn't not pay any amount, not even a few pesos a month, for such a service. Instant Messaging is just not something I associate with fees, like web page browsing, or IRC. Besides, if it becomes popular, someone will make a free version of it, or if everyone else thinks it costs too much, it will die a quick death.
It will take some real work to pull this off, but gratz if they do.
The speed of time is one second per second.
Who cares!? This is stupid. If they added a whiteboard, that would be really interesting!
Does anyone else use Yahoo! Messenger? :p They've had an avatar system for a while now (previous to AIM's SuperBuddy icons), and it's fairly nice if a tad limited in choices. Check out avatars.yahoo.com (ie only, lazy ass yahoo coders). The avatars have multiple facial expressions each, and they react to emoticons used in chat.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Wake me when the avatar responds based on your facial expressions and body language.
Not a bad idea, given the missing aspects from text/emoticon communication, but too half-way house.
fortune -o
>> A webcam pretty much does the same thing - except you don't have avatars, you ARE the avatar.
I think a lot of the desire for these things is to still have that layer of abstraction/anonmnity between you and the people - likely strangers - of who you communicate with online. It can be an intimidating thing to plaster your face in a window with an anonymous party. Also, while this has gotten better, setting up a webcam for IM applications can be fairly non-trivial.
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
Not to mention, I don't always want to share my emotions with a particular person. If I were to have a score calculated, based on what I write, emoticon usage, etc., etc., it might tell people more than I really want them to know.
The big advantage IM has over face-to-face/phone is that the other person sees what I want them to see.
If I'm really pissed off about something, I may not want everyone to know about it. Often they can tell when I talk face-to-face. Not on IM.
Am I the only person who hides the buddy icons and who turns off the ability for other people to set fonts for me to see?
I see IM as a vital means of information exchange. I don't need to see someone's AIM "expression" or "super duper 3d buddy icon".
Why can't text based communication just be text based(information based)? That's why I liked irc before mIRC decided to allow color codes.
_ and ! should be enough for anybody. -- me
Chris
You're right, this is where it falls down. I collect a bunch of emotes, then I find I want to express wry exaperation. None of them are quite right... so I find myself wishing I had one, searching for it forever, not using it ever again.
What I've discovered is that if you install a Messenger Plus Handwriting plugin, everything changes. If I want a different expresison I just draw it. If I'm trying to show how I set something up, I draw it.
Admittedly I'm an illustrator... I spend more time drawing every day than I do talking. You don't have to be professionally trained to draw cute smiling faces. Most people have trained for hours in boring meetings.
I think this is where microsoft is really missing the boat on their Tablet PC system. My MSN plugin is error-prone because it's not supported by the OS. I have a wacom tablet, but I can't buy the Tablet OS because Microsoft invented a fictional market of brilliant young businesspeople rushing about and jotting cocktail napkin ideas worth a million dollars to each other. They locked the OS to licensed tablets and pitched to that market, so I'm stuck.
As usual, a marketing concept has crushed a real possibility. Writing isn't a very good way to conduct business, but drawing is a great way to get a feeling across to someone who isn't there. My friends have picked up on it and draw back to me... they're not all artists, but they do alright. Many people spend their time on PaintChat for this reason, but only the ones who can wander through the labyrinth of the various incomplete English translations and bizarre server rules.
The graphical experience is definitely missing from chat. 3-D is just a silly way to go about it.
The Palace did this back in 1994. They key difference between The Palace and this new IMVU, is that The Palace uses 2D avatars, where as IMVU brings in 3D.
"Is humanity throwing out the significant advancement of expressing thought with an abstracted language?"
Not only that, but do you really need a _bad_ facsimile of body language to stop people flaming because they're too darned quick to anger?
A friend of mine once said that he doubted that Shakespeare would have been enriched with emoticons.
This is a technology looking for an application, and bunging graphics on things appears to be the 21st century equivalent of bunging a clock on everything.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
I think it was about '89 when Q-Link (C64 service which eventually became AOL) introduced ClubCaribe (or something like it) where you can get an Avatar and walk around an island and chat with other people - all on a C64 with a 300-1200 baud modem. It cracks me up that it took a better part of a decade to get AOL/Prodigy/CompuServe/ etc. up to similar level of technology that Q-Link had and apparently it is still going.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
So I read this and I'm thinking "1986? Wtf, there's no way there was anything like that in 1986." ...I guess we weren't in 6th grade at the same time.
Habitat. This paper, released in 1990, has a screenshot (c) 1986. Here's the designer's resume... it gets five or six pages in Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community. Neal Stephenson credits it in the Snow Crash author's notes, possibly because it's the first use of the word 'avatar' in an online context.
deus does not exist but if he does
This was the first link after I put "jabber whiteboard" into google ...
There's a half life 2 mod in production that promises to be a virtual chat room, but will of course have the benefits of hl2's physics and graphics (people able to knock a coffee of the table, for example), instead of the early-90's looking wrml. I imagine the chat will be like ever other multiplayer chat interface.
It's somewhere on http://www.hl2mods.co.uk/ I can't remember the exact link unfortunately.
Nothing costs nothing
Simple, actually. Have a web cam follow some key points in the human face, and transmit those points to whoever is in the receiving end of the message. Not a picture, just coordinates. Then, when the victim gets the message, have his client map the observed expression into a 3D model of a face.
Don't like to look to a face ? Just switch off the graphical part - the other one will never know. Don't like the face the other guy chose ? Just change it. Want to make a face of your own ? Go ahead - simple 3D models are small, they can be sent with the first message. Don't have a webcam ? Just define a few expressions (as sets of coordinates) and send them.
Or just make a MMORPG which doesn't even pretend to be anything but a giant chatroom. Make it a 2D one (or pseudo-3D like the first GTA) and it can be very small and fast. Anything anyone says will appear as a word balloon over their head, and stay there for a while. Or maybe one could use the style some CRPG's use, and make characters face appear on one side of the balloon ? That would allow one to get the best parts of both systems...
Coming to think of it, it shouldn't be all that difficult to implement a normal IRC client that way. The movement commands are going to be a problem, thought - I don't want to spam the ones using a text-based client with a flod of pointless messages, and moving around and separating various conversations in the same chatroom with a physical proximity / distance is a natural way for humans to act. Hmm...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.