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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.
Another next-gen Web 3.14159etc bit of market driven consumer comfort teat dehumanization flavor of the month I can conveniently not give a shit about. YEEEAH!
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.
Good luck getting this to work with linux anytime in the near-future.
"Sorry, avatars are currently not available under KDE, please try GNOME".
sigh.
At least we'll have open and standardized furry suits and dildo hats, now. Thanks.
Different identification at different sites cuts down on spamming, trolling, phishing, everything bad out there.
_____
Thank you.
I call dibs on Lexa Doig!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
While IBM, the Second Life Guys, Sun, and who knows all else want portable avatars, I from my company, Mightyware (annual sales: $78), thinks that Avatars should be proprietary and incompatible.
"Universal avatars mean an LCD approach to avatars, or a hideously complicated API, and to what end?" says, Stork. "Why not allow all developers, in the name of freedom, to make up their own kinds of Avatars...these things represent your -life-, and so, while an LCD approach might be ok for things like Java, they certainly should not apply to a digital representation of your own psyche."
Let's all agree that the privacy invading portable avatar nonsense is just that, and get back to the business of writing our own propreitary avatars...
This is my sig.
So if I understand correctly, they want the cartoon avatar that accompanies my email to be used as my U.S. passport photo?
Yeah, there are going to be 1000 comments about why not just step outside? But I think it could be a great resource if I could step out my virtual front door and
Look to my left and see my neighbors blog and the books he's published
Look further down to see another slashdot reader living a few doors down
Look to my right and see the restaurant hours and menu posted
Look down the street a block or two and see what movies are playing
and of course... add a pink flag to any and all women living in the area that are my age, and have their social networking profiles set to single.
one persons utopia is another's dystopia of course but I like the concept.
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.
...by permitting user-chosen surnames. I assume the portable aviatar will not be required to use one of the Linden Family surnames as all SL users must. This has always been the goofiest aspect of SL.
...but good luck in getting a Gravatar to actually load...
Bow-ties are cool.
I was just thinking, what if one could combine Google Earth, Sketchup, and Photosynth? Maybe throw in Wikipedia for good measure. Imagine how cool it would be if you could zoom to Chicago and see a scale model of the Empire State Building, with all the texturing done by a combination of photos. Something like this I think would be amazing, and would be one of the sweetest way to check out buildings and monuments that are far away and expensive to travel to.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
As a bounty hunter, I can find work anywhere. Just try to outsource me, just try!
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/
Why not implement them in Java and call them "javatars"?
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
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.
I've always thought it would be cool to cross information available online with information in the real world. The major problem is the interface obviously. I would love to be able to walk down an actual street and see an icon floating above someone's head letting me know they have a blog. As I walk by them i could download their blog and read it. Or maybe browse their myspace/facebook/whatever. The bandwidth is almost there via various cell networks, wifi or what have you the only problem is actually seeing the tags. I think i saw a movie or read a book once with eyeglasses that projected an image in your eye and generated a heads up display. You still need to interact with it somehow though. my 2 cents.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
You can't take the sky from me...
Will our Avatars be able to change genders on the fly? I mean, in my social group I would be myself, but on WoW where I play hot elf..er...manly ogre...
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.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
I've been 'trying to get into game programming' for a while now, and I see a lot of talk about 'why doesn't someone create a standard library for objects' and such.
It usually comes down to 2 simple things:
1) Technology changes a -lot- year to year, and more complex items can be created.
2) Different people want the objects to do different things.
The 2 interact to quite an extent as well. Say someone creates a stove. Person A only cares that it looks like a stove, but B wants to have the oven door open realistic, the knobs turn, flames on the burners... A doesn't need that complexity because it's simply a background prop and having all that will slow the game/app down for no reason. B intends to have a Sims-like game where the stove is going to be 'used'.
Even the simplest of object have this problem.
As for VScape, it sounds nice, but will it handle first-person well? Physics? Run-n-gun gameplay? User-operated vehicles? Also, your news page says 'the latest news from the Joomla team' or something like that. Might want to change that.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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.
So we can engage in Avatar Capital Punishment?
It used to be fun until people took it seriously. Now it's just another buzz in the Drug Store of Culture.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Nothing says that you have to use the same avatar across networks and applications. The only difference will be that, for those who are proud of their avatar or don't want to rebuild their network of friends, things will be easier.
Vernor Vinge may be one of the best near-future fiction writers around atm. When you read the book, it's hard not to see at least some of the details starting to form already.
[clever sig]
Steve Mann has been doing this kind of thing since the '90s. Well, since 1981, but it didn't really get wearable until the '90s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann
http://wearcam.org/steve.html
When I met him at Usenix he looked more like a guy wearing dark glasses and an unusually thick sweater for the season... his wearable computer was built into a vest and the display was hidden in the glasses frame. The new model Eyetap is no more obtrusive than the borg-style bluetooth headsets you see people wearing.
He's done stuff like having his reality completely mediated, with advertising around him bluescreened out by an image recogniser back in his office. The possibilities are endless.
We have a few test apps we're assembling in VScape - a first person shooter, a vehicle combat game, a Sims2 clone, and a kids game that could be considered a cross between Animal Crossing and some of the Harvest Moon games.
First person is simple with good architecture and low latency, frankly its the easiest game to build (and we have team members that have worked on several such AAA titles), although FPS is difficult to differentiate from the myriads of entries in that space. Physics is a religious issue inside games - they're highly overrated outside of a few niche applications where they shine, like ragdoll effects, some collision dynamics, and IK/FK. We've been playing with ODE, but often application specific solvers are far better.
And thanks for the heads on the news, almost all of our web work to date has been in the private side of the wiki, getting hundreds of docs ready to go public with the client.
zoom to Chicago and see a scale model of the Empire State Building,
Being unnecessarily pedantic I'm sure, but last time I checked, the Empire State Building was in New York City. Now, I haven't been east of Colorado in a couple of decades, but I think I would have heard about the move....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Does anybody know how to log into to Slashdot using my AOL avatar?
Awesome!
The CB App. What's your 20?
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."
Other than the fact that IBM is now down on this action, is this any different from the last time that they announced this?
Same company. Same thing. Three weeks later.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Sounds like your a project to watch, then. I wish I had more time to mess with stuff like this. -sigh-
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
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. :)
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.
They seem to be more interested in Mono, and the OpenSIM project is in .NET. :(
Perhaps someone ought to tell these people that Gravatar has already done this.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
In the book http://www.amazon.com/Halting-State-Charles-Stross/dp/0441014984/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/103-5637353-9593416?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192128514&sr=1-2 Halted State by Charles Stross, a key plot centered around avatars from one game being able to move to another. While there are too many obstacles today to really make this feasible or desirable, In the not too distant future, I believe our kids will look back and wonder what took so long.
Google is working on a 3-D social networking environment incorporating Google Earth and Google Maps
wow, this will be just like ... going outside and ... meeting real people....
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
am sick and fucking tired about hearing ANYTHING involving Linden or Second Life.
That POS 'game' needs to die, and it's quite obvious the only reason it gets as much press as it does is -- oh em gee! -- a number of journalists like it, and it's far enough away from a hack 'n slash that they can get away with writing about it as some sort of LAWLSOME NEXTGEN WEB2.0 FUTURISTIC SPIFFINESS when it's really just a steaming pile of crap.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
"The comic book guy's" wet dream.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Portable Avatars really? Isn't there more useful/interesting problems to solve? Like.. I don't know, getting the idea behind OpenID working first before worrying about "avatars"?
[alk]
well well. Beta invites avail, send me one!
-zariok-
Except it will become obsolete in few years
as software and hardware improve.
Older avatars would look primitive today.
Think of 8-bit sprites.
I'm thinking that everyone is taking the avatar concept too literally... it's more like being able to translate your identity from one world to the next rather than bring in your visual representation wholesale.
Seems like you could bring over things like screen-name, currency, social network, contact info and more meta-attributes while taking on whatever physical attributes are typical in a world.... yes physical appearance is for some people a big part of their 'identity' but in a virtual community where such things can be relative to the laws of that world.... well a translation is probably the best you're going to get. In fact it would be pretty fun to see how that might occur, ie: an avatar in one world might be a 3D cartoon squirrel who is also female and then in another world the avatar would present as a tall skinny blonde chick wearing biker clothes.... and then in an all male world, maybe as a smallish nerdy guy with thick glasses or whatever... seems like part of the fun would be seeing how your character translated and then needing to do some modifications, just for that world... takes the role-playing aspect to another level as well.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Go ahead and just leave me as the lanky pale avatar that comes as default on all the systems already, its pretty much a spitting image of me anyway...
This all seems great 'in theory' as in "look -- shiny new avatar! over There! instant portability!"
But the reality seems more like "all your logins are belong to us".
No one here has raised the government angle, but once you get all the logins coordinated to a central system, then it starts getting easy to lock people out of the internet.
For example, right now "sex offenders" (everything from child rapists to people caught pissing outdoors) have to register themselves everywhere, and trial balloons are being floated to do the same thing to drug offenders, creating your typical "slippery slope" situation. (For another example, the government swore up and down when Social Security numbers were created that they would not be a universal ID number for US citizens. Riiiight)
People who owe child support are currently being denied passports, and the government has their famous "no-fly" list but they have also created a new "no-work" list so that the "illegal aliens" (and possibly political activists) can now be denied jobs via an anonymous government database. So once you have your "single sign-on" to all your internet communities/services (for avatar portability), then it will be easy to start locking out "sex offenders" (to protect the children, of course) from the communities, and tie it to a Social Security Number (to prevent the sex offenders from just creating a new login or userid). From there it is a simple step for repressive governments to block that login / avatar from public discussions.
Our country has admitted "disappearing" people and has admitted "enhanced interrogation" (torture to anyone else), so it does fit the description of a repressive government. And Yahoo and Google certainly seem to want to jump at the chance to do this kind of thing for China and other repressive governments so it's not too much of a stretch to think of it happening at home. No different than your telecommunications companies spying on you for the government.
Senator Ted Kennedy somehow found himself on the terrorist "no-fly" list 5 different times when he tried to fly in the US after 9/11. So it would not be too much of a stretch to find yourself with a "Denied" message when you... [No Carrier]
If that's a side project you've been working on in your spare time, then you deserve MAJOR kudos. However, I sincerely hope that's not your day job, because I don't think you're going to make any money off of it.
Apart from the fact I think the whole idea is stupid (how does it make sense for my City of Heroes avatar appear in World of Warcraft?), the real issue is "hand off" between virtual worlds. i.e. if I walk from one metaverse to another, the receiving metaverse needs to have some trust system in place that accepts my login based on trusting the sending metaverse - even though the receiving metaverse has never seen me before.
If I am already a user on the second metaverse, there isn't a problem since my avatar has already been defined. I suppose changes to my avatar need be propagated, but the real issue imho is hand-off, not coming up with some version of "JPG for avatars" which every system will implement differently anyway - and also, open the copyright can of worms.
...is gonna sue!
GURPS for avatars, eh?
What makes you think Germany would do that? Germany has rather harsh laws to protect personal privacy. Forcing people to reveal stuff about themselves to the world doesn't really fit into that.
Well?