[pandorabots-general] FW: One Avatar, Many Worlds

[Stanley E. Honour]

  Another effort at commonality and portability while there is still no
graphics / avatar standards.  (formatting modified here)

 

Tuesday, April 08, 2008:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20529/page1/?a=f


One Avatar, Many Worlds


Companies want to let users carry their avatar identities online. 

By Erica Naone

 

 

uses in a virtual world, is currently bound to the particular world in
which it was created. But at the Virtual Worlds Conference 2008
<http://www.virtualworlds2008.com/>  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 <http://www.daz3d.com/> , 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 <http://www.multiverse.net/> , which is building up a
constellation of virtual worlds made by different developers
<http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20508/?a=f> . 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 <http://www.weblin.com/home.php?room=en1>  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
<http://www.secondlife.com/> . 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. 

[1] 2 <http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20529/page2/>  Next >
<http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20529/page2/> 

 

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