The Value of 3D Avatars in Online Work Spaces (Comment of the Week)

Responding to my skepticism about 3D avatars for online work spaces, Neil Canahm makes a good (if somewhat pluggy, but that's fine) point:

I think that the 'avatar as representation and extension of yourself' is less important than the effect it has of anchoring you mentally in the environment. That is the crucial difference with 3D environments imho - saving you the mental effort of constructing a virtual space in your head to hold everyone in and keeping you feeling as if you are all working together in the same place, looking at the same material or experience. This is both the power and the challenge of virtual environments for work - you need to experience it to understand it. With AULA, our 3D collaboration environment for enterprises, we always have the same experience - before entering people are skeptical, after they immediately see the benefit.

Having said all that - the ability to change hair styles and colors is essential for a certain section of the userbase :)

Maybe the best solution is offer the option of a customizable avatar and a default one with minimal avatar-ness, so to speak -- for instance, like the avatars above, used in Immerse Framework, a toolkit for multi-user creation of VR environments.

Comments

[Joey1058]

The pic you provided IMMEDIATELY reminded me of telepresence robots. I followed the links. From what I found, Immersive appears to have become Acadicus. And doesn't have the bot avatars that you show. Pity. I could see bot manufacturers providing avatars of their hardware for this very scenario. And of course this is the first I've seen this image. I obviously missed the 2015 blog post when you first reported it. XD

As for Neil's sentiment on it, I concur.

[Clara Seller]

I wonder how much of this depends on point of view?

From a management point of view, I can see the appeal of of reducing subordinates or clients down to your own personal puppet show in a box.

From a subordinate point of view, this had better pay pretty well if you want me to do tricks.

From a client point of view, you've got to be kidding.

There's probably a reason why this concept keeps failing over and over again. This little bubble of big tech wet dreams we're living in is a nanosecond in the history of human evolution. The real world is coming at us like a freight train and it's saying " I will not be ignored".

Technology and robotics is with us and it's toys will serve us, but our future isn't going to look like this little animated office. Survival is going to dictate that we get our heads out of our asses and back into the real game of life. The chores that need to be done and the changes that need to be made are going to require people with more vision and skills than this. "Balance" is really going to be the next big thing and the leaders and celebrities it produces are going to be the ones painting the picture of the future. This ain't it.