Tailorable blog

A standard for avatars

Yesterday, I attended a talk by <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Ludlow”>Peter Ludlow</a> at Twente University. After his talk we had a brief discussion on the need of a standard to represent avatars. In my opinion, such a standard is needed because of the following two reasons:

• More and more virtual worlds are being created. We already had Second Life, There, Entropia Universe, Active Worlds, Habbo, Croquet, Ogoglio, and a million more… and now even Coca Cola is creating its own virtual world.
• It takes a considerable amount of time and effort to customize your avatar, build its social network of real life and virtual friends, and build a reputation.

I would most certainly hope to see a standard arise that lets me transfer my avatar and its social network between different virtual environments. Of course there will be aspects of an avatar and her posessions that are platform-specific, so my avatar may look different in different environments and may have different possessions, but I am curious how much we can cover in such a standard and still keep it acceptable for the developers of virtual worlds. 

One man, one avatar

Recently, I had two experiences with avatars and the identity of the person controlling them that made me wonder. Here is what happened:

When visiting the ABN AMRO island in Second Life, I had a talk with their virtual hostess, Amber Jung. We talked about some part of their presence in Second Life that I was interested in, after which I flew away (as these things go in SL) and explored the place. Coming back to her, 15 minutes later, I just told her my impressions of what I’ve seen. After a few sentences, I noticed that her replies were a bit odd. She told me that she just took over the shift to control the avatar, so she did not know about our previous conversation. The difficulty for me was that I had no way of knowing this, since her name and appearance did not change in the meantime.

The second situation happened when Hans, a colleague of mine quit his job. Since he used to be in charge of our test area in Second Life, he owned our virtual land and the objects there. As it is not always possible to transfer ownership of objects to another avatar in Second Life (this is a property the creator of an object can set), we decided that the easiest option would be to transfer his avatar to me. The funny thing was that for the outside world this transition was totally invisible. He kept the same name and the same appearance (only in a cheaper outfit, as Hans kept his virtual classy business suit). So people who knew the avatar before, would engage in a conversation with me and I would have to tell them that I was actually somebody else, although I looked the same and had the same name. These things do not happen that often in the real world.

I wonder if we can design virtual worlds in such a way that users controlling the avatar have the option NOT to be anonymous. Of course you can indicate in SL the “first life” information deep in your profile. However, that information is so hidden that no normal person will regularly look at it, especially if you already know the person. One more consideration when thinking about the business uses of virtual environments.

Reboot 9.0 and new work environments

Please visit Ewan McIntosh’s blog (http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2007/06/reboot9_your_id.html) for a discussion on my session “Your ideal working environment” on Reboot 9.0.

As I mentioned in his comments as well, I loved the stories people told about their ideal working environment and the fact that this seems to be not only very personal, but also depends on what type of activity you are engaged in (creative or having to finish a paper).

Also very interesting to hear what some people considered ideal social software: software that understands when it is okay to disturb you with awareness information and when not: a Twitter that knows when to bug you. I certainly see some design challenges and possibillities for further research there…

The good news is that I will be able to test some of the suggestions I heard in the near future: the kick-off of the Telematica Instituut project on new work environments is next week! In this project we will start living labs at various medium-sized and large organizations to test the impact of new, flexible collaboration processes. We know that social software opens up new possibilities for communication and even enables new working processes. However, we also expect that the motivations of people to collaborate do not change significantly. So, with this consortium we are going to investigate new working environments, in the physical and organizational sense and in terms of (social) software support.