The vision of online existence described in cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash may still be a few years away, but there's no doubt that avatars and virtual-world technologies are looking spiffier than ever. There's no place where that's more evident than at the Contact Consortium's Avatars 97 conference this week in San Francisco. While last year's conference was dominated by discussions of technical aspects of virtual worlds, the technology breakthroughs of the past year have caused this year's attendees to take heed of the social ramifications of these emerging avatar worlds.
"Avatar worlds, however awkward as they may be, as silly-looking as they may be, represent something new - the return of the Net's community mechanism punching through the Web," says Bruce Damer, chair of the Contact Consortium. "Virtual worlds offer some of the power of The Well, but with a visual face that allows a lot more to happen.... As Pavel Curtis said, 'People are the killer app of the Internet.'"
Numerous groups were on hand at Avatars 97 to demonstrate their cool new 3-D characters - many of which are the first digital actors and actresses, in many senses, that don't involve deep human interaction. In the "Episodic Performances World" panel, blitcom was demonstrating its VRML "comedienne," Bliss. In the afternoon, Oz Inc. showed off its new "interactive" character, Kyoko, an online representation of the Japanese virtual rock star Kyoko Date, whom Oz is now rendering into an online version for "chats" with fans in a 3-D world. Other panels showed off AI-enabled virtual pets, and other highly-rendered avatars created for gaming, chat rooms, and general entertainment purposes.
But while one handful of attendees were busy exploring the latest greatest breakthroughs for 3-D characters, other panels seemed concerned with exactly what avatars might mean for the humans who will occupy them, and what kinds of communities might emerge as they become more prevalent.
"Virtual communities are the effect of reducing opportunities for social interaction," pointed out Sandy Stone in the discussion "Text-Based Virtual Communities and Web Worlds." Since public spaces have been rapidly disappearing in cities, Stone pointed out, and the emphasis has been increasingly been put on the individual instead of the collective, text-based online communities have been filling these holes in the social consciousness. The question, then, is how building graphics and individual avatars in place of textual communities will effect those collective faceless environments. Is simply bitmapping a face onto a video wall or avatar really an improvement on text-based chats? How to enable those avatars with new gestures and languages?
As one audience member offered Thursday, "Avatars give people the illusion of high-bandwidth contact - but we don't actually have it. Perhaps this is a problem with graphic worlds. With a text-based world, I just imagine things instead."
Other panels touched on similar issues of community building versus individual identity. "Social Lifecycles of Virtual Communities," which included Jeff Bouglass of Electric Communities and Gail Williams of The Well, explored the dynamics of social interaction and individualism in textual and avatar-based communities. Issues discussed included how groups within worlds desire to be unique - either by their avatar's appearances or their group's missions and purposes - and that conflict as well as a sense of intimacy is what will bring people back. And in an afternoon panel on "Transcending Gender in Virtual Environments," a panel of women and one man debated whether gender constructions can be overcome in cyberspace, and whether co-opting a woman's (or alternative) identity can truly constitute a female experience.
And of course, there was a strong emphasis on recognizing the limitations of virtual communities and what they could offer, but also a hope that people could take what they experienced online to the offline world - whether to smash through gender stereotyping, or learning to create community among real-world humans.
As The Well's Williams put it, "One of the strongest meanings of virtual environments is that it's a place to learn things we can take back to other environments."
