A standard for avatars

June 14, 2007 on 11:52 am | In virtual existence |

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. 

4 Comments »

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  1. Open Croquet, Ogoglio, and Second Life all use compatible (if not identical) avatar data formats. The problem is social, not technical.

    Many companies consider their account data to be their most valuable asset so it will take a few large success stories on platforms with OpenID’ed avatars before they see the light.

    Comment by Trevor F. Smith — Thursday, 14 June, 2007 #

  2. Robert, check this out:

    http://www.3pointd.com/20070614/exploring-the-future-virtual-cosmos-with-ibm/

    It seems IBM is working on avatar portability.

    Comment by Peter Ludlow — Friday, 15 June, 2007 #

  3. I think you point to a very interesting issue; in a way, it resembles the whole debate about identity 2.0 (see great presentation by Dick Hard on the matter - http://www.identity20.com/media/OSCON2005).

    So, in a way you can imagine that something similar will be developed for virtual worlds too - one unified resources allowing people to transfer from one world to another, keeping certain key features and qualities with them.)

    One small problem is weather people want that? I am sure that some do, but I am also sensing that for many people it’s important to keep their separate identities (=avatars) apart.

    Comment by centralasian — Wednesday, 20 June, 2007 #

  4. On the issue if people actually want one avatar we had a nice discussion with the audience at the event at Twente University as well. I like the idea of connected virtual worldlets, where I have the option to move with my avatar from one world to another. Most probably, I will have multiple avatars anyway, just as I have multiple e-mail addresses for multiple purposes now.

    Comment by robert — Wednesday, 20 June, 2007 #

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