VR: What's in an Avatar

svenzie (54)in #hardware • 7 years ago

The moment you put up your goggles, see a cliff, your body starts shaking and starts to feel weird. You are experiencing something as If it’s real. VR happens on a lower part of your brain stamp. At the moment you take your VR goggle of, you remembered you have experienced something not only seen something. VR can be really powerful. This also makes it a very social experience especially when eye tracking and body tracking is further developed. VR is like to become a social platform.

This will create a whole new social VR economy. The companies that will make this social VR experience will become the largest data companies in the world. Because in order to make your own virtual avatar imagine what those companies all need to capture from you. Companies that are making those VR goggles and those experiences for you, are not making money to sell that to you but they are making money by selling the data.

How to make it avatars work?

To make social VR work with avatars body language and facial expressions are important. There are companies that will try to implement facial tracking into VR to make the experience more realistic. Current solutions are for example with Facebook to press a button on your controller for the right facial expression or to listen to your tone of voice. However this isn’t 100% accurate.

It is important to make avatars work in the end. Because there is a social attachments from humans to avatars. If you go for the realistic approach you have the uncanny valley issue. But where is the point that avatars become too real?
In general we want to create something that looks similar as us. Research showed that the link is the strongest at the moment that the avatar looks like as we thing we look like. So an idealization of yourself.

An interesting thing is that we as person will behave with our avatar in the way how the world is treating our avatar. An experiment showed that people who used an ugly looking avatar are much more likely to act as a closed protective person, while if they play with a pretty looking avatar they will be more open.

Another example is a situation where people played as an avatar and went to the gym. If your avatar lost weight in the virtual world after going to a gym, you are more likely to go to gym in real life, then if your avatar didn’t lose weight in the virtual world.

Those researches prove that there is an emotional connection between human beings and their avatars. Avatars can influence the perception we have about ourselves. This isn’t weird because we are taught in that way from our childhood. Think about simple things such as pink is a girls colour and blue is a boys colour or other different meanings to colour.

This also shows there is an important ethical question about how far can we push people to their virtual identity as an avatar. For example with Second Life there are people that cannot distinguish anymore the difference between their real life and their virtual life.

The future

For the future there is a lot to solve to make avatars work in the Virtual World. One of the opportunities for companies is to be that first company that can create a platform wide universal avatar. Technical implementation such as face tracking and body tracking needs to be solved to make an avatar work in a virtual world.