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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."
A graphical, 3D chat environment? Oh, you mean Star Wars: Galaxies!
I thought Microsoft had a similar product a couple of years ago. Microsoft Chat or Comic Chat or something in the kind... You could select a comic character and assign it facial expressions and such. :)
It died a silent death
Why is this news?
Banaaaana!
A webcam pretty much does the same thing - except you don't have avatars, you ARE the avatar.
If I may point out, this isnt anything new. Blaxxun, Activeworlds, Secondlife are all similar 3D platforms, but have a great deal more experience & interactivity (having all existed for some years now). I posted some info on my favourite 3D platform at the moment (Secondlife) here
(Also check out Activeworlds & There (nb: there is more a social use, like the topic, rather than a 3D platform on it's own.))
#!/bin/csh cat $0
Is there a skin of someone who looks like me sitting at their computer in their underwear and sipping folgers? Perhaps with some 3D rendered clothes on the floor and a bowl of dried up ramen next to the keyboard?
From a person that uses Apple, Windows, and LInux on a daily basis, I hope that Apple allows Whatever technology they are building into Tiger for the new IChatAV Teleconferencing, they allow to be ported to other OS's.
I suppose it's fitting that AOL is building the metaverse. In Snow Crash the Street was run by "computer graphics ninja overlords." I think AOL could fit that role.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
I haven't logged on to it in years (read: since maybe 1999), but I always remember that I thought it was pretty cool given the 3D capabilities of x86 machines at the time (read: none), and it wasn't TOO bad for dialup. Even played MIDI tracks while you were walking around. I think they eventually went to a pay-for-service model, and hopefully they eventually adopted some kind of 3D acceleration technology (via ActiveX?)
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I'm probably just too much of an IRC addict to like the idea.
"[..] It feels a little like a solution in search of a problem. [..]"
Come on, text-based chats are more than enough
for easy real-time communication. If you want
something fancy use a Webcam-chat or video-conferencing instead.
"IMVU gives you the sense that you are in the presence of the person you are chatting with,"
Wow, that sucks. Now I'm not going to put any family members in my buddy list.
With recently discovered security holes in JPEG imaging and perhaps other graphics libraries, graphical chat doesn't necessarily sound like a step forward ...
Crystal90210: OMG!!!1 dont chat with CuteA0Lb0y!!!!1
my sister did and now she's pwned!!!!1
FLAgrrl: LOL!!!!1
Honestly, not only has this been done before with other chat clients (didn't Microsoft have a failed attempt), but what's the point? Who would actually use this? When I use AIM I specifically disable smilies and such because they're annoying... why would I now want disembodied aliens on my intarweb screen? AIM having those "themed" IM windows in 5.0 was a terrible idea. They just keep adding more crap into their client, kind of how they ruined ICQ.
If you say "here goes my karma" I will bite you!!!
should include more animation.
/goatse.cx command and your avatar ... er, won't go there.
Nothing funnier than having your friend make fun of you and you execute the
I am
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.
A system where you could talk to anyone else in the world, in real-time, by simply entering the person's ID into a device. I'd definitely use that!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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.
This won't catch on, because people generally use IM while doing something else. I can type a message and then read some email (or type a message to someone else) while waiting for a response. When the other person does respond, the window icon blinks or jumps around or whatever is usual in your chosen environment to get your attention.
These 3D environments (I've tried a few of them) generally require more attention, since firstly there are generally lots more people involved in conversation, and your "relationship" with other people in the space is a lot more hazey, based on where everyone is in the environment rather than just who they have chosen to talk to today. Also, many of them don't have an easily-usable scrollback buffer, so you can get lost in the conversation if you look away for a few minutes.
IM will always be text-based just because it's more efficient that way. Systems like Second Life and There have their place, but it's not as a replacement for IM. (Side note: There actually has IM integrated into it, and surprise, surprise... it's text-based!)
Oh this seems cool. But think about it.. whos really gonna have a use of this? I think its a little overkill.. I got enough with normal msn (with amsn ofcourse:) But what do i know hehe..
I thought there was already a similar software doing the same thing a few years ago... I think it was called The Palace. Probably someone already mentioned that.
Remi
Home sweet localhost.
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
When my mom and dad were kids, they worked on the farm. (29 hours a day, etc, etc) But they played with nearby kids.
When I was a kid, I mostly played with nearby kids, but my parents drove me to a few friends' houses. (and vice versa)
My kids played with a few neighborhood kids, but mostly we drove them to friends' houses. (and vice versa)
Do you see a trend here?
In the old days, we adapted and adjusted to the people around us. We are progressing toward simply finding people like us, so we don't have to adapt and adjust. The widespread availability of the car was probably a driving factor in this. But even as we are more choosey about our friends, we have to retain the same set of acquaintances, because there are after all the limitations of the physical world.
Now add the Internet. It makes it more possible than ever to withdraw from the real world. To some extent, it even allows you to minimize interactions with real-world acquaintences. Now we can pick our friends AND, to a good extent, our actuaintances. Or at least, the Internet allows us to manipulate our focus more easily, ignoring or bashing those who do not fit our world-view.
I would submit that our interpersonal skills are atrophying as a result, and that one place it becomes evident is the current election cycle. When you pick your friends and acquaintances, it becomes easier to turn the world into "us" and "them," and that seems to be what the world has been about, the past few years.
*****
Virtual Universe? I don't WANT a virtual universe that looks just like the one I'm in. A brisk walk in the real universe at least gives me a little cardiovascular exercise and stimulates my other senses. The only thing that really interests me in the virtual universe would be places I can't go, for reasons of money, time, or accessability, or places that just don't or can't exist.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Instant messaging exists as a communication tool. It is more interactive than e-mail but more convenient and less expensive than the phone. Trying to gussy it up with 3D garbage and requiring you to use the mouse a lot to communicate makes the whole process less efficient and more expensive.
Why not just let me communicate? This is the same reason I don't have games, text messaging, a pepper mill, or a camera in my cell phone - none of these things would make it a more effective tool for verbal communication or an efficient tool for non-verbal.
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.
Just forget the rancid way people behave on IM for a minute... This graphical chat thing is just absolute garbage! ...Google perhaps?
If anyone has been around for a while you may remember back when Instant Messaging was functional and innovative- nowadays it seems development by these big companies has stagnated-- and these are the new features? 3D heads floating in space??
The only cure for IM is to allow interoperability between clients, this would allow for greater competition-- because as it stands now people are stuck with whoever has a monopoly on IM in their country- AIM in most of the U.S. and MSN Messenger everywhere else...
Could someone (or some company) save IM!?
Emoticons and animated "emotions" inherently make people less able to convey their actual emotions. If you just use the best approximation out of a collection of pictures or animations to express yourself, you are limiting yourself much more. With words, you can say something that has never been said before to describe precisely what you're feeling. I don't see pictures doing that. While people who know you closely might be able to make correct inferences about your state of mind based on your use of these icons, the redundancy caused by everyone else in the world using them too makes this difficult for people who don't know you as well. Also, if the animations are actually supposed to be important in the context, the program is demanding a lot more of your attention, which would make many of us more reluctant to use 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.
"typed emoticons offer only minimal clues to someone's state of mind."
What happened to using language to explain the state of your mind? Is humanity throwing out the significant advancement of expressing thought with an abstracted language?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Actually, what I'd -really- like to see is a "shared" canvas, where you can both just doodle on. Sometimes a quick picture, even if it's just a few lines, says more than a thousand words.
Take life easy: one bit at a time.
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...
A 3D environment that suffers for all of the reasons listed above: takes too much attention, learning curve is too steep, bandwidth is too much, still doesn't reflect emotional tides in the conversation. Essentially, it is too cumbersome to be able to add anything to a conversation, and is expensive to implement (either in terms of bandwidth, developing cost, etc) that 3D chat environments aren't widely used.
However, what I think these systems are really trying to do is to add a sense of "belonging" to a virtual space. Instead of chatting in the abstract, without grounding in real-world metaphors, these systems are trying to associate the chat with real-world analogs. Therefore, anything that accomplishes that goal would be a success.
Based on my experience of MUSHing, I have to say that I think the same could be accomplished if the MUSH environment was wedded to a chat protocol. When I MUSHed, I always felt more comfortable chatting in my built environment, even when I was OOC. Why? Chatting in any given place carried the same information. But I had some custom coded objects that I could show off, but more than that I knew the objects that were described and I could much more easily imagine myself sitting and chatting in a place that I knew than trying to picture doing it in a random place.
So instead of going 3D, I think folks like AOL or whoever would do better to develop a chat environment that allowed for descriptions to be viewed and some interactivity with objects. Also for characters to "pose", that is I type ":: glances into his wallet" and YOU see "Johnny Mnemonic glances into his wallet." You can't currently do that with chat systems with which I'm familiar, although you can see that it adds depth to the narrative in a seamless way. That would be enough to simulate presence in a "sitting room" and would allow more complex interaction, although would still have all of the benefits of text-based chat.
The reason that MUSHes lost out to other kinds of gaming is that when gaming one really wants to have a visual experience; but when chatting, one wants to communicate with as much control as possible. When you're chatting, I think people are willing to read; so they might be inclined to read through your descriptions of your "room."
For this to work, you wouldn't want to have to log in to a MUSH server, although I'm surprised that there aren't more just chat MUSH servers (seems like they all want to put you through this chargen thing, whereas I really just want to shoot the breeze.) You would need a client that can interpret the action commands itself and display back the requisite info, so a client and server should be balled up into one; and the syntax would need to be ubiquitous enough that the command actions from my friends could be interpreted by my server reliably. But would that really be that complicated?
--
$tar -xvf
Anyone who thinks it is only possible to have a "minimal" sort of conversation over a textual medium is not sufficiently familiar with the medium. Nearly all languages use arbitrary symbols to convey meaning and connotations, and text-chat is no different. Sure, ":-)" a priori carries only a minimal amount of information, but use of thisand many other, non-emoticonsymbols, in context carries quite a bit more information.
It's probably reasonable to say the the bandwidth of textual communication is lower, and thus the total amount of information transmitted has to be lower, but it's not correct to say that this requires it to be a crude medium with no connotation. When you've been talking to a person or group of people over a textual medium long enough, you start to speak it fluently, and use the arbitrary symbols in a useful manner.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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
Hey, I'm one of the engineers at IMVU. I thought many of the coolets things about IMVU weren't even mentioned in the article, and figured I'd post a link. Please feel free to post your comments. Oh, and if you're interested in joining one of our many free software projects, drop me a line.
For those of you too lazy to click here is some text from our About Us page:
Our philosophy
* Censorship-free micropayment economy - We're creating a marketplace for digital goods that (as one of our customers put it) is "for the people, by the people." We have worked hard to prevent the IMVU experience from ever being overtaken by our opinions, preferring to leave it up to our customers to decide what they want to create and do with IMVU.
* Open platform - We know that good ideas come from all over, not just from our office. So we're committed to creating every opportunity to open up our platform to new kinds of creativity. Let us know if you've got a good idea.
* Eat our own dogfood - We've set up our business so that if our developers don't succeed, we don't succeed. We like it that way, because it prevents any distinction between our developers' interests and our own. Developers use the exact same tools we do to create content for IMVU, and can sell in our economy just as well as we can.
* Release early, release often - We are committed to fast fixes and rapid iteration, and strive to incorporate as much feedback as humanly possible. We think the fastest way to grow a successful product is to release the product as early as possible and to improve it over time in collaboration with our customers. We appreciate everyone's patience, and believe that we will all share in the reward of seeing IMVU's exciting and rapid evolution.
* Free and open-source software - IMVU would not be possible without the countless contributors around the world that have developed, tested, and maintained the many open source and free software projects we use. We strive to use free and open-source alternatives whenever they are available, and actively engage with communities that produce the software we use. We are contributors to many projects, and have even started a few of our own.
Can your IM do this?
Doing more and more graphical stuff might bring in more kid types into the fold, but would seriously ruin it for the rest of us - specially it is probably going to require more clicks or keystrokes to do the same thing.
An analogy is HTML email. It is great for the junk that my company sends to all its employees - I get to see the company colors(guess that is supposed to make me more loyal) but how many of us attempt to colorize our day to day emails? Should I use ctrl-b to highlight the work - duh?
http://kantster.blogspot.com