Observing Avatars

This is a composite image of the Welcome Area SL11B's landing point with arriving avatars. I used 10 pictures that were taken from far. Photographing was done for about 20 minutes, with the viewpoint fixed. This image shows avatar movements well.

Just-appeared-avatars are shown in gray. Most of them keep standing still for a while. For a person who operate an avatar, that is the time while the viewer is drawing the surrounding scenery. For a person who is watching, the viewer is loading textures of skin and clothing of the gray avatars. As the download progresses, avatars get colored gradually.

Greeters talk to them at a right time. Sometimes they move around on the tablet to guide them. Avatars go ahead and jump down one by one, then they disappear from the sight of the camera.

 

Reading Avatar Movements

This is an automatic slideshow using 10 photos taken from far.

You can navigate slider also with right/left arrow keys of the keyboard or swiping right/left on your screen. Putting mouse cursor over the slider or making the browser window inactive will stop the autoplay.

Now I try to read the movements of avatars from this slideshow. The following numbers are corresponding to the slide numbers.

• Greeters are standing by.
• Catching the sign of avatar emergence, a greeter in a red shirt who was in the right-most position ran up to it.
• An avatar arrives. Rendering the avatar starts.
• Rendering continues.
• Red shirt greeter says welcome in chat.
• Another avatar appears in response to a teleport request sent by the arrived avatar.
• The called male avatar lands. Rendering of the previously arrived female avatar ends.
• Rendering of the male avatar proceeds.
• Rendering continues.
• It seems the couple jumped down away from the tablet. Greeters turn to them.

The couple after their jumping are in this picture, that has more range than the slide No.10.

Why could I read like above?

No.5 is because the greeter woman looks like typing a keyboard. The gesture of typing in air is the standard animation during inputting chat text.

No.6 is because the positional relation between the couple indicates the arrival of the male due to a teleport request by the female.

 

On Avatar Body Language

Avatar behaviors can be divided into system-driven and manually-operated. Manually-operated behaviors can also be divided into being intended and not being intended. But it's hard to distinguish among these clearly.

Man always tend to read information from human-shaped things unconsciously. It's the same when the target is avatars. Various gestures or animations are attached to avatars, so man will read body languages from them. The example shown above is simply about coming and leaving of avatars, that are not accompanied with complex states of mind. But when it comes to talking with people, users connect avatar body language to the operator's state of mind. However, it's also difficult to judge how far we can recognize avatar body language as having a certain meanings like in the real world. If mistaken, it may cause human relationship troubles.

Avatar behaviors or movements, in most cases, don't represent operator's mind. But users sometimes do express things with their avatar bodies, and it's one of the very things that features the virtual world. We can also find presentation of unconsciousness in the sense of distance among avatar bodies in crowded places, like we do in the real world. Reading avatar body language correctly is an indispensable skill to use the virtual world, despite that it has seemed not to be argued particularly, I think.

How should we consider avatar body language when using the virtual world? Then beyond that, how should we make others see our avatar behaviors? Because Welcome Area SL11B was also a landing point, I could get a good chance to observe avatar movements. In this page I put some actual examples of reading their motions. But it should be examined again in detail at another opportunity.

 

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