Sunday 10 August 2008

Future-avatar dance party

In the future, the Augmentationist's avatars will look like this:
http://www.spiral-scratch.com/index.php?page=gamecam3d

Why does an avatar have to look like a Pre–Raphaelite painting? Cubist tries hard to look cubist, but Ian would prefer to look like an impressionist painting. Vibrancy and life at the expense of detail.

Imagine a shared space occupied by the live 'holograms' of real people like the one in the link. How would a virtual meeting be different if you could virtually shake hands at the start? Maybe people could learn dance moves together. (Dance distance learning?). The lack of authentic body language cues in conventional conferencing systems is a major problem. Slightly glitchy, but undeniably alive avatars might give off all the right signals to improve our chances of accurately judging mood.

The scary thing is, this could be actually quite straightforward, technically. We should play.

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