Avatar office chat rooms7/21/2023 With such a broad audience we need tools to find people with similar interests.Taking a virtual selfie of your avatar and the people around you both gives you something to do and a way to connect again.Gesture is currently the most engaging part of your avatar since the mapping between your real and virtual hands is so precise.What’s needed are more options for clothing that reflects a diversity of cultural heritage, ages, and hairstyles that authentically reflect race. There is such an opportunity to represent ourselves in richer ways! Every platform we tested reflects Gen Z’s eternal love affair with tee shirts and jeans and hackneyed stereotypes that reflect immaturity.In Horizons, we were like peacocks–and people from around the world flocked to us for a chat. In an environment like this where it’s free to appear any way you want (jewelry, hair, makeup, and tattoos cost nothing) and you can switch your appearance in an instant, hyper-expressive competition is inevitable: the more outlandish, exaggerated adornment, the more likely you are to be noticed. In Horizons, you hear people’s real voices, but you don’t know their names or where they are from or their topics of interest, so the only way to find your “tribe” is the social signals of how you appear: your hair, glasses, clothing, tattoos, piercings, and more. Since these environments are “chat with anyone” experiences, we chose fashion extremes, more like dressing up for a dance club. In both, step one is the avatar-building experience. Horizons is a perpetual cocktail party hosted by the company formerly known as Facebook for anyone in the world to talk about anything. To test the most recent avatars we put on our Oculus Quest headsets and dropped into Meta Horizons and Microsoft Altspace. Will the same brands have influence online? When coworkers show up in Monday morning’s staff meeting as a rockstar hedgehog, a brontosaurus or a dewdrop, it will certainly change the conversation. The issue of dress in the workplace is sensitive, layered, and nuanced. Where will we go for guidance on how to dress appropriately for the work metaverse? There is no Vanessa Friedman of the New York Times in the Microsoft Mesh world, no Tom Ford or Anna Wintour there to help us navigate. With so many new ways to represent ourselves, we’ll need new etiquette–and not just for our faces. Work avatars could let people inhabit a “constructed self” to project exaggerated emotions, like Greek actors who don tragedy masks in a play. The masks of Carnivale in Italy and of Mardi Gras provide anonymity and lack of accountability that allow people to explore other facets of themselves and behave differently than they would in their day-to-day life. In t he 3d century A.D., Romans used battle masks to make soldiers appear fearsome. In popular multiplayer games like Valorant, players play a fantasy avatar that offers disguise, a set of talents and storytelling immersion. Of course, avatars can also be masks that conceal identity entirely. More realism is easier to achieve than ever with fast processors, and it may convey more emotion too. The Wii avatars are flat and abstract like the lion at left below, while Animojis are more 3D.
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