Should Social VR Avatars Be Cartoonish Or Realistic? Both, Argues High Fidelity's Philip Rosedale

Back in 2014 while in early development, High Fidelity avatars looked like what you see above left, intentionally cartoonish. In fact, if the girl in the yellow blouse reminds you a bit of characters from The Incredibles, there's a very good reason for that: The starter avatars were first created by a Pixar vet. Nowadays, however, High Fidelity avatars that the company promotes are more apt to look like the top right -- the 3D scanned avatar of Ashlen, a real life cosplayer.

Why the change? After all, the biggest avatar-based worlds and platforms (Minecraft, Sims, Roblox, etc.) have cartoonish avatars. High Fidelity lead developer Philip Rosedale, however, doesn't see it as an either/or:

"There are good use cases for both types, we don't have a preference. There are more cartoon ones than photo real in our marketplace. Companies like Doob are showing up with the ability to do very good scans, and we want them to work great, and so lately you have seen a number of them including Ashlen. Modeling tools like Google Blocks and TiltBrush will soon create a big new market for great handmade ones, I suspect. And our default one is the wooden guy!"

Philip tells me most High Fidelity avatars by early users now are custom-made, but says he thinks most consumers will gravitate to photorealistic ones:

"I think if you study people in-world today you would find that the majority use animated or handmade avatars," says Philip. "And I think that mass market will have more people starting from photorealistic scans because it will be an easy way to get started if you're just going to a meeting or something. But in the long term, the distinction will blur, because everyone will get cosmetic touchups to their avatar no matter which kind they started with."

A good example of the latter case may be HiFi's Jazmin, whose avatar is an appealing blend of realistic and cartoonish.

For the record, my personal read of the market is quite different: The vast majority of people who use avatars of any kind are not emotionally invested in "being" the avatar, so photorealism isn't important at all. (Again, think Minecraft, or for that matter, World of Warcraft, in which users call avatars "toons".) For most people, an avatar is a reference point for doing things, as opposed to being an end in itself.

Comments

[Clara Seller]

Well, I only have any real experience to draw from SL. If you took away the importance of the avatar in SL, I think the economy would collapse. The fashion blogs would dry up, the events would be dead, and a woman would be pretty hard to find in the world.

I dunno, but I kind of think an avatar, regardless of what you choose, is one of the most important things about a social environment. It lays down so much unspoken information about a person from the start. It's like saying most people don't think teeth are important for anything other than eating in the real world.
Try to get a job, make a friend, or get laid without them.

[JohnC]

An avatar should be just as you wish it to be. But VR/Virtual worlds being as they are, then you should understand that, being initially a visual experience, you will be judged, as in RL, by the way you appear to others in that world. You see this type of initial mistake made in SL, where new avatars call themselves some silly name because they think it is a silly game. Then later you see them living with this stupid name throughout their SL life. If you look like badly drawn cartoon, then, unfortunately this is what all those who do not know you in RL will see you as. LL never understood this. If you want to see really bad Avatars look for LL employees

[Carlos Loff]

On this matter it has no meaning for me what the developer thinks, if they stay cartoonish I wont even register, olain simple, crystal clear, straightforward... But nowadays is so simple to bring options and choices, so everyone is happy...

[millay Freschi]

I just happen to be doing my dissertation research on this very subject. I'm with the rest of the commentators: without the avatar - customizable, realistic but not TOO realistic, it's not going to have the same impact. DOING stuff is one thing. The interactivity and immersion are important as well but the avatar is not just facilitating our "doing things". millay allows me to reinvent myself, explore aspects of my personality and create a reality that bleeds from my virtual to my physical. I'm going to be sending out a link for a survey about this very topic. Perhaps we can see what the research says.

[Ciaran Laval]

People like their avatars. I'm not particularly fussed about avatars but I've seen enough discussion from enough people to suggest it is an issue.

Sansar has been criticised for its avatars, in a Sansar meetup the issue of avatars came up and some people said that the reason they hadn't gone to High Fidelity was because of the cartoon avatars, so whether it looks like the person or not, it does seem to be a bigger factor than I realised.

[DanCoyote]

One of the key things I noticed in SL is that people were able to transform themselves into whatever they imagined. Cartoon avatars might be easy for developers, but they do not address the key freedom of pseudonymity that brought and kept so many people in SL.

[Boterick]

I agree with Dan, and Carlos, (And Philip). Folks like to have choices, of being anonymous or not, fantasy or not. For maximum immersion in roleplaying, I think an appropriate looking av is really important, hence my own opinion on why SL remains so popular (Easy to create individual great, or awful looking avs, as desired), but I think not so important if representing myself. I have a number of avs. The ones I use for the real me in either SL or HF, I care least about the looks of. Also, the possibility of being able to create non-human avatars must be important to folks who like to roleplay animals. And a requirement I have; machine avatars, to represent machines which can be controlled like avatars for real world Engineering scenarios.

[Amanda Dallin]

Ciaran is right. A sizable portion of the prospective audience for VR cares a great deal about avatars. I've been to High Fidelity twice but will probably never return because of the cartoonish avatars. The Jazmin avatar shown several times here in NWN does not appeal to me at all. It looks like a claymation cartoon. Sansar needs more options for avatars soon or people will associate it with poor avatars and not bother to try it.