Can You Make Your High Fidelity App Avatar Look Like Your SL Avatar?

I mean I guess? This is what I get when I use the new High Fidelity smartphone app (free on Apple's App Store here; on Google Play here), take a requisite real life selfie, and then modify him to look like "Hamlet Au", my avatar in Second Life. (Which is, in turn, a variation of what I look like in real life, only dressed up like Tom Wolfe.)

As you might have guessed, this is part of High Fidelity's transition from making a metaverse to first creating a kind of "metaverse for Slack" online work space. So as High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale explains, these are specifically a kind of augmented reality avatar merging real life identity with a virtual one:

We’ve seen the power of personalized avatars at creating a sense of presence, especially for teammates who are physically remote from one another. Whether they’re hopping into a private quiet space for a quick 1:1, meeting in a conference room or gathering in a cafe for coffee, avatars that are recognizable make communication easier and more organic. 

They’re also practical. Non-human avatars are an amazing way to express your creativity, but they may not work well in a professional context. Using an avatar that resembles you also eliminates the self-consciousness around video calls — no more fretting about messy hair or need to worry about that toothpaste dribble on your shirt. 

This strikes me as the wrong direction to take workspace avatars. Almost by definition, the kind of companies most likely to be interested in using 3D avatars in a work environment would be in high tech, gaming, marketing, media, and other industries where there's a premium on personal creativity. One whole point of  whimsical avatars is they're a great way of breaking the social ice between strangers and acquaintances. (Think a big Halloween costume party, but online.) Why get rid of that?

Anyway, check out Philip Rosedale's High Fidelity avatar below. Where his Second Life avatar famously had a handlebar mustache, codpiece, and leather chaps, his HiFi avatar looks more like Philip Rosedale if there was a Japanese anime biopic of Philip Rosedale:

Here is my new avatar, made with our new app from a selfie... try it and show me you... https://t.co/zPTEntgNU2 pic.twitter.com/o2BYRKtkur

— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) September 24, 2019

Actually I'm thinking more like South Korean boy band biopic!

Comments

[Batterys not Included]

Sorry but HF has ruined that place, never listened to anything the community pushed for, they closed the HF sponsored world, It's a mess the best thing he could do is spin off his new project as a new separate business while selling HF assets to LL to pay creditors.

HF under linden lab could be turned into something interesting again.

#HFTOO
#MakeHFGreat