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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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
You can't take the sky from me...
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
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
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Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
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!
But why does this all remind me of Snow Crash? Or even William Gibson's writings? It seems all to real....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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."
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.
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