Philip Rosedale's Case for Adding 3D Avatars to Online Work - My Take

Last May we talked about High Fidelity's pivot from building the metaverse to creating a kind of interim "virtual world for Slack" application, and now here's founder Philip Rosedale blogging his case for making that switch:

Trying to make eye contact in video calls has always been awkward at best. If you look directly into the camera, you can’t see your friend. If you look at the screen, you’ll appear to be looking below your friend’s line of sight... 

Avatar technology is a huge step up over video calls. In VR, you can be anything, and while most of us will opt to look like our physical selves, we may also use it to transform our identities completely — ushering in a new era of “blind” job interviews, where the interviewer can’t see sex, color or class. We’ve already built the tools. Let’s put avatars to work. 

I can argue Philip's case in both directions:

On the pro side, there's a whole generation in their teens who grew up owning 3D avatars (Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, etc) and are soon joining the workforce; they'll not only be comfortable with having a 3D avatar in an office setting, they might even expect one on some level.

On the con side, Philip might be over-applying his experience with 3D avatars in Second Life, to 3D avatars in general:

Second Life was (and is) one of the few game-type experiences where so much emphasis is placed on the avatar as an extension of the person's real life self or personality. For the most part, when we're talking about Minecraft and the other major online games, the avatar is not designed to represent the player in some fundamental way; rather, it's primarily a conduit for accomplishing game tasks. So even a Gen Y office worker might wonder why they're expected to create an avatar just to conduct conference calls.

But that's just my initial take. More research on avatars and identity within the larger online game worlds is definitely needed. 

In any case, you can click here to request an invite to High Fidelity. And be sure to listen to my May chat with Philip on this topic below:

Comments

[Neil Canahm]

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 colours is essential for a certain section of the userbase :)

[seph]

"In VR, you can be anything, and while most of us will opt to look like our physical selves, we may also use it to transform our identities completely — ushering in a new era of “blind” job interviews, where the interviewer can’t see sex, color or class. We’ve already built the tools. Let’s put avatars to work."

Nothing new about Philip creating imaginary problems to solve in order to pitch a product, but a bit crappy of him to dangle this unsuccessful product as a means to solve racism and sexism in hiring.

I hope he tries it out when interviewing the next Linden Lab CEO. Do it blind as avatars to lessen the chance of a four-peat white guy running a world successful due to largely different demographics.

[sirhc desantis]

RosedaleDroid searches for ... next pitch. I quit at 'talking all the time' with heaphones on.
@seph nailed it.

[Madeline Blackbart]

TBF Minecraft characters have skins which people spend time creating to represent themselves, Same could be said for roblox. Fornite people pay real money to purchase clothing and things for there character. So for the gen Y who grew up with these games designing an avatar to some degree would hardly be "odd".

On top of that logically just giving a small selection of premade characters would resolve the "oddness" of having to create/dress your character yourself and still give a similar effect. As it's the sense of physicality that the avatar represents that is the most important in the sense of a meeting situation IMO.