Try Before You Buy?

I had a question for Philip Linden when he was inworld the other day that didn't get up the queue and got ignored by him and the mods but it went something like this: "Can avatarization in virtuality stay competitive with increasingly accessible and good- quality video, such as on cell phones?"

I've long been asking this question to myself, because the few times I've gone to these Virtual Worlds conferences organized by Chris Sherman, as well as State of Play, I've found a significant portion of the execs there to be highly skeptical of avatarization in general, and to be convinced that video -- as in video-conferencing, vlogging, video on i-Phones, etc. -- to be more important and just better.

Some people just don't avatarize well. It's like hypnotism. Either you hypnotize, or you don't. If you do hypnotize well, you think it's a great thing, say, to stop smoking. If you don't, you think it's stupid. Some day they will be able to explain why some brains work this way, some don't. It will be likely a genetic thing, like whether you can curl your tongue -- or not. I mean, you do, or you don't.

People are that way about avatars. They either invest their consciousness in a toy, as Will Wright so perfectly put it back years ago, or they treat it blandly and even cynically as an email attachment, like Benjamin Duranske Sycophanske. People can even get emotionally very zealous on behalf of avatarized virtuality, or very hateful and malicious -- avatarization or video transfer -- these are about power and loss of control.

One of the ways in which people have been saying avatarization in virtuality would be useful and be a great business model is "try before you buy". Boy, that's been a flop. Or at least...not quite tried yet. I think somebody thought American Apparel or Armani could be these things, but the clothing was either not available, too dull by contrast with your avatar's wardrobe in this fantastic world -- or not something you could really see so clearly. I mean, the obvious problem with the try-before-you-buy stuff is that in many cases, you'd have to make your fat and lumpy RL self -- or at least your less-than-perfect RL self -- and put them in a virtual world for everybody to see "as is" -- to really get that "try" thing going. And who is going to do that?! I mean, you have a chance to have a *second* life, and you will make your RL replica? Why?

My tenants at Fasan in Patagonia have these great mirrors that have recently come on the SL scene that you click on, and it automatically changes your camera around without you fiddling with the dials to put you in a pose so you can see yourself. This is fun! I can see this getting better and better in SL. At one point, there was an idea that CopyBot Mannequins would help you with this "try before you buy" -- *cough*. More on that next time!

But...meanwhile, video has been keeping apace, and makes all this avatar stuff just look retarded at times.

I was just reading Time Magazine's issue with all the inventions, and here's what they got:

Something called Social Retailing developed by IconNicholson and to be shown in Bloomingdale's. You try on an outfit, and you can send a video to your friends' -- I think to their cell phones -- and get their feedback. Read more here.

The picture in Time even shows a mirror that is able to overlay on to your actual self in the mirror a kind of transparency, in this case, a skirt. It's the first sort of Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End kind of thing I've seen transposed into the real world.

So of course these mirrors can start getting smart, and do things like "Show me what this will look like of I lose 20 pounds" or "show me another colour in this same outfit" and "send this to my phone to look at later," etc.

People who are life-loggers and more "out there" -- the young -- would probably prefer video and real-time and interaction within real life. Why fool around with downloading and fussing with an avatar?!

Or you get people like Scoble, who says he has "a television station in his pocket" with his i-Phone and kyte.TV and Twitter. Or Draxtor at blip.tv.draxtor, who just opens up a laptop and starts broadcasting a TV show from your lunch table.

Scoble doesn't seem interested in fussing with avatars, not only because the Lindens booted him and his son from SL over his underage son trying to play with his father, but he just doesn't seem to care very much about avatarizing. If you are wealthy and live in Halfmoon Bay and have cameras and videos and time to walk around putting everything up on the web, why avatarize? Avatarizing would be retarded in your case.

Avatarizing might work better for people who have less resources, or who don't want to project their physical self (old, fat, disabled, transgendered, etc.), or who are shy -- or who simply like the greater freedom to manipulate reality in digital form. This might create a divide, these two notions.

Philip Linden has always been counting on the ability of virtuality and avatarization to win, because it provides people with endless power to manipulate the environment and do things like fly, suspend gravity, prototype, implement in accelerated fashion, etc.

But what if video gets good enough to do some of this, like in a store, or a cafe or bar, or at home? Not to fly, but to do stuff like, "What if I make this like that?" If it gets more accessible, cheaper, better, not just cramped and poor quality on your i-Phone, but on a laptop or a console in the wall in an office -- would you fool around with an avatar?

It might turn out that the grey people logging on at public terminals as in Snow Crash are the avatars who are too poor or too ugly to videoize themselves, and the wealthier and more fabulous will get to have videos and augmented reality on their higher tech toys to amuse themselves. This is when immersion and augmentation will really split.

Of course, virtual worlds have their charms. More interactive, 3-D, spatially connected, contiguous, with serendipity, happen-chance, inspiration. Videos inspir people, too, though, even being grainy. Remember that first walk on the moon?

There's a sinister side to all of this, of course, just like the scraping of avatars in virtual worlds, especially if they Googlize.

Here's what the try-me video people say:

"The technology
One of the key technologies behind Social Retailing(SM) - Near Field Communication - further serves to help retailers monitor inventory in real time and collect data that provides valuable insight into customer mindsets, behaviors and evolving needs."

The video might ultimately be projected on the avatar, too, inside the virtual world. The avatar will broadcast the video, too.

Comments

[Dizzy Banjo]

It's fascinating to think of these two threads as seperate competing trends, but I'd hope that they will actually converge.

The other day I saw an avatar in Second Life with his webcam mapped onto a prim face. Surely it won't be long until this additional stream of personal information freely flows into the virtual realm in much the same way as voice does now. I'd think that, much the same way as voice has instantly been tweaked, enhanced and altered by some parts of the community with things like MorphVox and eventually with Vivox Voicefonts, perhaps 3d tracked video would.

As for how similar people make their avatar to their physical self, and conversely how people try to make themselves like their avatar, I think this convergence would just enable more choice. I think some people would still float around as a giant fried egg.. but perhaps have a 'photorealistic live motion controlled complete bodyscanned metapresence of their real self' avatar too.. Whilst I can see many uses for increasing accuracty and realism, I think even the rich would still avatarize in a deliberately abstract manner - even if purely for fun..

[Prokofy Neva]

Dizzy, the problem with this idea of mapping on prim faces and such is that after a certain point, the developers, if not the customers, have to ask, but why pipe this through a clunky virtual world, when I can just get it out on the Internet? I don't need to be lagging out in a virtual world suited up in an avatar; I can just go on a browser.

The goal of the most extreme open sourceniks is essentially to remove the avatar from Second Life, and thin it out so much that everything is a browser.

The avatar represents the individual, however. (It's like the eyelash in the eye of Zamyatin's "We," which was the inspiration for 1984).

Some find this avatar and its limitations in the way and they don't want to avatarize. Others find it frees up access to the world of all possibilities. This is really going to be a dividing line.

There'd be no point to bodyscanning your real-life self on to an avatar shape or a prim when the cam on you built into a wider-screen terminal with your computer will make avatarizing unnecessary.