Avatars

One of the things we are spending time on in our quest to look ahead is virtual worlds and avatars.

I've spent some time in Second Life and have created a persona called Flat Plasma.  I haven't spent any money there yet and am not yet as addicted as Scoble and Kent Newsome.

But there is something really interesting in the intersection of virtual worlds, social networking, and the ability to create almost any reality you want.

So in an attempt to add some virtual reality to this blog, I created an avatar of myself at SitePal, a cool service that allows you to create a hosted avatar and put it anywhere you can place some javascript (like my blog).

I annoyed a bunch of readers this morning with the audio and so I've cut that out for now.  I intend to allow you to play my avatar's voice if and when you choose, but I haven't worked that up yet.  I will, hopefully this week.

And I plan on changing the look and feel pretty regularly.  Ideally, I'd like to put this avatar everywhere I've got a picture on the web; last.fm, myspace, flickr, etc, etc.  It would be cool if everytime I change my avatar, it instantly changes everywhere I've put it.

Jackson says in the comments to my MP3 of the Week post today:

I think Virtual fred should lip synch to the mp3 of the week.

I might try to make that happen too!  Cheerios has something like that called Cheerioke.com.  I'll have to check it out.

Comments

[jackson]

I like the green shirt better than the yellow fleece. I REALLY like dragging my cursor around and watch you follow it, just like you view the whole of the web, you're always looking around to see what's moving on the net.

[Greg Deocampo]

Hello, Greg here. Frequent reader, first time poster. :)

People are having extremely rich, entertaining, social media experiences in SecondLife. Last week, a friend of mine who mixes music weekly at a SecondLife DJ club, declared that she had fallen in love with and intended to marry (in SL) a friend I had introduced her to, who looked like a nightmarish insectoid alien but was definitely a really nice guy (and who has a 6-person flying car, handy for getting about). There was eventually a Secondlife wedding ceremony (I wasn't able to attend).

Subsequently, there was also a messy SL divorce-- something about repeated, inappropriate use of nuclear missiles while at an acoustic guitar lounge.

Secondlife explorers are welcome at:

"Musical Artist Exposure Central" in Zale.

I'm exhibiting a "3D movie trailer remix" there of the New Line Cinema release, "Take the Lead," by EclecticMethod.Net, a DJ collective from London I'm working with on 3D video mashups-- part of a project I'm presently selling to content owners, media networks, and advertisers. It's a video mixer's mobile media web service, mashing tech and content into a "social, 3D TV network"-- a new kind of internet media.

We're producing a "mixed reality" party, bringing Secondlife.com machinima to the video mashup parties we're throwing in SF and NYC-- while simultaneously bringing those video mashup parties into SL machinima. June 6, 2006-- 6/6/06 is the NUMBER OF THE AV FEAST.

If someone wants to get started quickly in SL, you can find the secondlife installers here - http://secondlife.com/community/downloads.php

Once you install, you can quickly get up and running by logging in as

first name - emergency last name - tones
password - gregdeocampo

Be careful, it's easy to spend way too much time tweeking your avatar. I've solved a lot of those problems by being a giant zebra named Deo Beeper.

[csven]

"But there is something really interesting in the intersection of virtual worlds, social networking, and the ability to create almost any reality you want."

This extends beyond what you're suggesting here. Second Life and similar virtual world platforms have the potential to morph into PLMware. The 3D data being shown in Second Life (or any videogame for that matter) is not all that far removed from the CAD used to make the products we buy in real life.

There's more than three roads at this intersection.

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

My Virtual Model
http://mvm.com/en/index.htm

[curmudgeon]

the sitepal thing is nothing new - remember xeyes?

the most amusing thing about web 2.0 is watching the 20-somethings reinvent for the web all the stuff us 40-somethings did on the desktop 20 years ago.

only this time you get $5M in VC funding so you can pretend you have a "business" instead of just a neat little program (until the money runs out).