Avatars and the New Frontier
I’m sitting here tonight with three browser windows open. One has 22 tabs open on Second Life and virtual worlds news, and the other has 24 tabs open on virtual world research related to aging. It’s overwhelming, and I have only begun to scratch the surface of what’s out there waiting for me to discover it! How reminiscent this is of when the Web was in its early days! When people first discovered how to use a browser, and they (and I) spent endless nights and weekends “surfing with their pants on fire” just to see what was out there and revel in the incredible displays of creativity. There were two camps…the one that preferred text only and turned off those newfangled images that just got in the way, and the one that loved the pictures because they made the technology accessible for the first time to non-programmers. They even sort of split along Mac and PC lines for a time. While some purists still insist on working in ASCII and using FTP from a shell account, they are now rare. Most developers I know are as happy to see images now as the non-users were in the beginning. Quite simply, we are increasingly becoming a visual society, and more and more of our communications are graphical.
That’s one reason why I so readily see the parallel between the early worldwide Web and today’s virtual worlds. I thought about saying Web 2.0 or social media, but it’s really not all of that. It’s about virtual worlds. Everything I’m reading in these “tabs” of research is pointing in one clear direction…some sort of avatar. The avatars can be little humanoid figures one moves about on a screen in a game or social world, or they can be more human or animal-like robots programmed to perform complex, tedious or impossible tasks in real life. One paper discusses bots that are programmed to perform daily Internet searches on specific topics and return daily news and updates. Another discusses phone systems integrated with chat bots that can have conversations so nearly real that the customer can be fooled. Another talks about the elderly and having a furry “artificial companion” to interact with to enhance quality of life (think Tamagochi pets and how mature adult people worried about getting home to play with their pet so it wouldn’t get depressed and look at them with sad eyes). More and more sophisticated avatars are emerging. RealXtend, for example, is creating avatars based upon the bones of the human skeleton. They will display accurate body language and appropriate facial expressions, making them more realistic than the deadpan avatars of today.
Human beings are strange creatures. We can see right through most guises, yet we are willing to suspend our disbelief instantly for the right appealing concept. I think avatars are that concept. Right now most people don’t know how to use a keyboard to activate an avatar, and avatars are designed poorly and can’t be transported from one environment to another. That will all change in the next couple of years as virtual environments become more secure and pervasive at work and at home.
If you read my articles regularly, you know I am an advocate and proponent of virtual worlds and avatar social interactions. They enhance communication. I can accept equally well receiving customer service from a chat bot that scores well on the Turing test, or giving my elderly mother a furry bag that makes purring noises as long as she provides the right sort of input to keep it happy. I simply don’t mind that we might be creating an alien race of intelligent machines that will be smarter than us when we reach the Singularity at some point in the future. I think they are wondrous and amazing — phenomenal products of brilliant human imaginings and ingenuity. Yes, what we have now is crude. And we don’t have standards or single sign on across platforms or legal or physical protections or complete understanding of what we are inventing. Those will come.
Right now we are in the explosive “pre-cambrian” period of virtual worlds, just as we were almost 15 years ago with the Web. New ideas and concepts are coming fast and furiously from a lot of sources. I know because I’m sitting here looking at 46 tabs representing articles and blogs or news sites that I would not be seeing without the development of the Web. Incredible ideas and possibilities are surfacing from unknown and strange directions, and there are few who yet know how to capitalize on them. (If anyone says they do, then they are just dreaming.) There is a long learning curve ahead of us. We can, however, see that what is emerging is important and will change everything, even if we just don’t yet know how! That’s what keeps me waking up and sitting down to work every day. To me it’s clear — virtual worlds are changing everything. Another frontier stands before us, with gold waiting to be taken from the rivers, and it’s a great time to be alive! :)
