Transporting your character: Users can design an avatar inside DAZ 3D’s modeling software and then use its forthcoming MogBox to transfer the character to virtual worlds. According to Dan Farr, president and cofounder of DAZ 3D, many users like to have both high- and low-resolution versions of their avatars, as shown above.
Douglas Shuler
Companies want to let users carry their avatar identities online.
An avatar, the image a person uses in a virtual world, is currently bound to the particular world in which it was created. But at the Virtual Worlds Conference 2008 in New York City last week, several companies showcased their efforts to allow people to carry their avatars from one virtual world to another, and even out onto ordinary Web pages. These developments point to a convergence between virtual worlds and social networks.
DAZ 3D, a company based in Draper, UT, that makes software and models for creating 3-D art, recently announced the MogBox, a program that would allow users to design a high-resolution 3-D character and transport it as an avatar to multiple virtual worlds. MogBox is designed to maintain the same look and feel for the character from one location to another, while adjusting for the graphics capabilities and styles of different virtual worlds. This typically means scaling down the high-resolution image, simplifying the textures on the surface of the character, and adjusting the figure's polygonal building blocks to follow the rules of different digital worlds. Dan Farr, president and cofounder of DAZ 3D, says that a lot of people want to move characters not only between worlds, but out of worlds as well, so that they can illustrate the character in higher resolution than most virtual worlds allow. The MogBox would allow users to take that representation in and out of virtual worlds, he says, and could be used to give people a consistent avatar designed to suit them. Farr says DAZ 3D plans to sell the MogBox to companies that run virtual worlds, as well as to individual users. So far, DAZ 3D has announced support only for Multiverse, which is building up a constellation of virtual worlds made by different developers. Farr says the company expects to add support for other worlds soon.
Focused less on high-resolution graphics and more on the social-networking possibilities of virtual-world technologies, the German company Weblin is providing users with avatars that they can use to surf the Web. When a Weblin user visits a website, his avatar appears at the bottom of the page, where it can interact with the avatars of other Weblin users. Users can dress their avatars, upload new avatar images, and import their avatars from the virtual world, Second Life. The avatar images come directly from Weblin or from sites that integrate Weblin's technology. Marc Theermann, the North American general manager of Weblin, says that as more users come on board, the company anticipates branding avatars with symbols to show where they originated--so that people with avatars made through a site for racing enthusiasts, for example, would know their common interests when they encountered each other.
The search giant's Lively software appears to be aimed at novice users.
Flash technology developed by Multiverse brings new flexibility to 3-D virtual worlds.
With the majority of virtual worlds currently being games, where you have limitations on how you can look depending on how advanced you are in the game.
(better armour in WoW, interesting outfits in SL, A Cape in CoH) I'm dubious how widespread this will be. Essentially I don't see most game based virtual worlds hopping on this, at least for a while.
Also the issue of anonymity, Personally I would probably have 3-4 different avatars, each which I would use in different sets of virtual worlds, hardly the unified image that is being attempted, but still usefull.
Dubious as I am on it's application I really hope this pulls through, as VW standardization is a big step towards the Virtual reality we see and strive for in Sci-fi.
I agree that avatar portability is very problematic for games. Aside from the strange idea of taking a character from the fantasy world of Azeroth into a science fiction setting, there is the problem of how the items in the avatar's inventory would be translated, and the question of why this would be done in the first place. However, for those using avatars for business purposes, the effort makes much more sense. Business people (who don't work in the field of virtual worlds) probably don't want to put a lot of time into avatar creation, and are likely to want to get it done once and maintain the same avatar, connected to their real names, from there on out. Finally, I envisioned DAZ 3D's MogBox as being particularly well-suited for people who want to take a character into several more socially-oriented virtual worlds, such as a Multiverse world and There (this is just an example, since they haven't announced support for There). Then, a person could use 3D modeling tools to design the very cool avatar they really want, and show it off in multiple locations. DAZ 3D's tool only handles avatar appearance, so it would only grant a consistent look -- it doesn't address the question of how to transport the character's inventory.
-- Erica Naone
I don't know if they ever will get to the point of a transitional inventory. This is definitely a step towards having business meetings and conferences in these VW's
I for one will probably snatch this up and probably make 2 different avatars that I'd use if the need ever arose
Artwork not credited properly?
The art showing the superheroine is by Doug Shuler, based off of a screenshot from the game City of Heroes.
http://www.douglasshuler.com/Gallery_firelily.htm#
Proper credit might be nice.
Re: Artwork not credited properly?
I'll look into this right away. -- Erica Naone
portability is inconsistent with innovation
How is a committee of companies going to create a standard that allows and enables innovation in the avatar design and capabilities? Even keeping the forms as human-like, the range of issues involved when adding features such as complex animations, physics based secondary motion, advanced facial animation, and so forth... these are all characteristics that impact how the base geometry is constructed, the data structures and organization of this information is impacted, and these additional characteristics should also be included in the portable data set... yet they are dependent upon the specific implementation of the animation system, the physics system, the means of user interface (VR style gloves vs. keys vs. Wii style controllers...) Efforts such as this are premature, and short sighted, IMHO.
This lets you set up your basic Avatar to import into each of many worlds. It would be the job of the online worlds who want to use this system to tailor the input they get to their environment. When an avatar gets put into the world they get automatically converted to work in that world.
Certain aspects of the Avatar would obviously be tied into the environment it's currently in. Once the avatar has been imported into world A, it has an inventory for world A, follows the physics for world A, gains experience in world A, and likely doesn't get taken back out from world A to be put into world B. Instead a fresh copy of the avatar gets put into world B.
The question for online videogames is a bit different. For instance, your social networking avatar likely wouldn't pass as an orc in WoW. This takes art design away from the creators of the game, and likely wouldn't happen except on a few games specifically designed for it.
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2 Comments
Looks like Gravatar's idea translated into 3D :)
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