Comparing avatars, how realistic can they be? How realistic do they need to be?
An assessment of virtual world avatars, how realistic
they can be, how realistic they should be and what, fundamentally
is the point of realism anyway when we are confined to a virtual
environment?. Generally, it is easier to represent yourself as a
cartoon-like character and much harder to represent yourself as
"photorealistic".
Later in this article we will look at Barack Obama
is as an example, as he seems to be quite well known.
Wikipedia says that an avatar is "a deliberate descent from
higher spiritual realms to lower realms of existence for special
purposes". Which is all well and good, but what this actually means
( in plain English ) is that an Avatar is really an extension of
yourself - sure you can represent yourself as a dragon, an elf, a
stormtrooper or whatever you like - but ultimately is that not a
"pseudo-physical" embodiement or representation of who you REALLY
are? When you go from an actual reality to the virtual reality how
much of YOU is there in your avatar? This is a very interesting
question (and no doubt all the social sciences students are penning
surveys and questionnaires as we speak)
However, in the traditional Maxping fashion, lets push aside all
that rhetoric and empirical nonsense and just get straight to the
point. Lets answer that simple question: Why do people have
avatars?
Two reasons:
1) To be somebody you
are in real life and want to reach out to an
audience to express yourself
2) To be somebody you are
not in real life and want to reach out for an
audience to express yourself
Does this seem ambiguous? Yes of course - but our argument is
that both are perfectly valid reasons for exposing yourself to
others, in a far more intimate and revealing way than chatrooms or
forums ever can be. Some want to use fantasy avatars, some
want to look like they are in the real life. If you don't want to
look like you do in real life, then of course it is easier.
Photorealism is a hard thing to achieve because human eye is
trained to accept fellow humans and easily senses any deviations -
but we can still be photo-real, even if we don't actually look like
we do in RL.
Realistic-looking avatar is especially important for virtual
meetings and business purposes.
The Second Life® Avatar
Lets begin at the beginning; The SL Avatar is based on a
mesh and skeleton, the modifiability is achieved using morph
targets. The SL Avatar has respectable 144 modifiable parameters.
See here how you can export and import SL avatar
settings to/from your own computer. So that's a great start, but
what about photo-realism?
Very recently the Second Life girl Cllie
Cline was the first Avatar that was selected to
the "Top 100 Hottest Females of 2007″ in
Maxim. So the Second Life avatar model can't be too bad! We
decided to talk to Amy Stork, a well known and slightly
disreputable Second Life resident about avatar creation:
Amy:
"I've always been a big
fan of photorealism - I like the avatars I create to seem real. I
know that we live in a world that is, ultimately an imaginary world
but it's very important to get things right. As a nudist colony
owner I see many people on a daily basis - leggy blondes, muscular
guys, all that rubbish. The ones I like the best are where they
have clearly made an effort to be different, just like in real life
- it's the imperfections that make us
interesting."
Opensim users usually technically use Second Life avatar if they
are using SL Viewers. This has worried some people as the licensing
of the avatar model is unclear. There is an effort that has started
to create universal free human avatar models that could be used
also in Opensim, Tommi Laukkanen wrote about it here.
Barack Obama in Second Life
Second Life avatar is cartoon-like with exaggerated muscles and
forms - although this is something everyone can adjust
themselves.
Olive avatar
Forterra's "flagship product, OLIVE™ (On-Line Interactive
Virtual Environment) is an open, distributed client-server platform
for building private, realistic virtual worlds." - excerpt
from
Forterra web site.
Barack Obama avatar in Olive
Olive avatar is even more cartoon-like than Second Life avatar.
Also, the rendering quality of Olive is optimized for low-end
hardware because of the wide user base at US government
projects.
Wonderland avatar
Sun Microsystem's
project wonderland is working to
enhance their avatars. The next release is coming and there
should be something better available at that time. Take a look how
you can try out Wonderland, it is really easy.
Avatar in Wonderland 0.4
Wonderland's current avatar model is really simple and low
polygon. According to their web pages there are significant
improvements coming. I hope that Wonderland project joins to
define universal avatars.
realXtend avatar
realXtend avatar can use Facegen's photofit feature to make
surprisingly real looking models. It is also possible to use any 3D
mesh as an avatar, some examples being shipped with realXtend are a
snowman and a mushroom.
Barack Obama's avatar in realXtend
realXtend avatar can be made to look
cartoonish, too as is the case with Rex
Ping. Avatar has more than 10k polygons and it has both morph
target based modifications as well as individual bones can be
scretched in the skeleton - which can lead to many very funny
avatars.
While realXtend avatar clearly looks realistic, realXtend is
still an early phase software. As an interesting note,
Ludocraft hinted at realXtend mailing list that they are
working to bring
face tracking and facial animation to realXtend.
If you have screenshots of an avatar in other virtual world
platforms (Barack Obama would be good!), please send them to me
(jpirkola@gmail.com) with some explanation and I will publish them
as a continuation to this post.