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Startford Station     Avatar Images

Early in the year 2000, Andy Roberts, Frank and Evan went along to the Millennium Dome at Greenwich, London and while we were in there, we each had ourselves turned into Avatars at the BT TalkZone. It's one of the best things you can do at the Dome, because you have something to bring home with you afterwards- a three dimensional computer animation based on your own photograph from 4 different angles, that can be viewed, rotated, and one day included in computer games, MUDs and graphical chat rooms - or so they say.

All that happens is, you go into a booth (a bit like those passport photo booths you get at Woolworths and railway stations only bigger), then you stand exactly in the right spot for one photo, turn around 90 degrees for the next and so on until all four pictures have been taken.

Then when you get home, you can go the Talkzone website, input your ID number and password and download a file containing all the information needed to re-create the avatar image on your screen. There aren't many things you can actually do with the avatars yet, but what functions do exist are fun, and the technology shows an amazing glimpse of how these things may soon develop.  

Once the avatar is downloaded from http://www.bt.com/talkzone/, the first sight of what it will look like comes when you run a simple viewer program.  We all had a good laugh when they appeared on our screen , and now you can too....click the thumbnail below to see the larger picture.

The next stage is to leave the impressive Bt talkzone site via the link http://www.avatarme.com/, to the site of AvatarMe Ltd, the company which is promoting their particular avatar standard worldwide.

Incidentally, the word "Avatar" has acquired different meanings during its history.

In French it has negative connotations:

"3.mésaventure, malheur" (c.f. Dictionnaire Le Petit Robert )

But in English is it neutral

avatar: n.

1. Hinduism : the descent of a deity or released soul to earth in bodily form.
2. Incarnation; manifestation. 3. a manifestation or phase
[Sanskrit avatara 'descent', from ava 'down' + tar- 'pass over']

(c.f. Concise Oxford Dictionary )

At AvatarMe Ltd, they state in  their FAQ ( http://www.avatarme.com/faq/faq.htm )


What is an Avatar?

At AvatarMe we define an avatar as: 'your bodily incarnation in Cyberspace'. We see your Avatar as being your representative on the Internet."

What is the origin of the word Avatar?

The word Avatar comes from the Sanskrit: 'Earthly incarnation of a Hindu god or goddess'


Who popularized the idea of Avatars?

Neal Stephenson popularized the idea of Avatars in his 1992 novel 'Snow Crash'. The following passage in Snow Crash explains Neal's vision: "As Hiro approaches the Street, he sees two young couples, probably using their parents computers for a double date in the Metaverse, climbing down out of Port Zero, which is the local port of entry and monorail stop. He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all part of a moving illustration drawn by his computer according to the specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars."

That's enough definitions, on with the funny pictures.......

Here's Frank's Avatar playing the game "fours" ( Connect Four )

Notice he's just about to win, but it wasn't Frank operating the Avatar at the time!


 Here's a really neat thing that's newly available - Morphing.

three togetherI downloaded all three avatars and then chose two at a time to read into the morphing program, still on the AvatarMe website. One person slowly changes into the other while waving their arms up and down. When you have images of people who are related anyway, it has an uncanny effect. Here are the three half-way pictures - see what the boys might look like in 10 years time or something like that.

 

  Evan  and Dad

 Evan and Frank

  Frank and Dad

  Thumbnail to another morph of Dad and Frank.

Skateboarding

And now, since updating something other in activex within windows I can even get the skateboarding program to run, which animates the avatars in a simple movie sequence. Here are three screenshots:

      

 

Links

http://www.dome2000.co.uk/  - The Millennium Dome - ( Live Dome Cam )    
http://www.bt.com/talkzone/  - The BT Talkzone site     
http://www.avatarme.com/    -  AvatarMe Ltd

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