Tim Charles of UK Company Televirtual appears on this week's edition of Click online, a rather too gee whizz look at information technology. He talks about and demonstrates virtual beings, avatars that stand in for humans in virtual and game environments.
Warwick the Avatar
The article has a couple of interesting points. the first is that we grow increasingly positive to avatars as their near human-ness increases, up to a point. beyond that point we suddenly stop liking them. The theory seems to be that their inadequacy as human beings allows us to fill in the missing information. That works as long as they leave us enough room, however, when they embody too much detail, they don't leave enough room for our perceptual apparatus to smooth off the edges and suddenly all we are aware of is their imperfections. (I'm doing some stuff on the whole problem of broadband applications and human perception, and this one slots in there perfectly.)
The second idea is that Music companies are very interested in Avatars because, as Charles says, they are obsessed with their intellectual property and it is "very hard" (but not impossible) to own real people in real bands, but avatars are cool, and the company can own everything about them. Why does that not surprise me. What will be a surprise to the music companies as usual, is that this will be a dumb idea. But hey, who am I to tell them otherwise? They have ignored everyone so far, might as well keep up the losing streak.
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