1H/ Avatar ID / Michael LIang

Session 1H

Avatar ID

Session Convener: Michael Llang

Notes-taker(s): Andre Priebe

Tags / links to resources / technology discussed, related to this session:

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

Avatar ID is the Identity in the Metaverse.

What is an Avatar, and what are its properties and features?

• Virtual, graphic representation of us in a digital world
• It can be photorealistic, but it does not have to show you. Rendering has to happen in real-time.
• Different Avatars for different personas are very likely and not completely different from our behavior in the real world.
• We can control the Avatar.

Are we in control of the Avatar or vice versa? Is there an Agency-Problem? And is the Avatar related to our Identity at all? Is the Avatar a part of us or vice versa?

Identity is about sameness in multiple interactions, but an avatar can be changed easily. But we have Avatars to be recognized easily - like our appearance in the real world.

People behave differently in digital worlds, not just in Metaverse but also in other purely digital, remote scenarios. The online disinhibition effect must be considered, even if the consequences may be in the real world.

Different avatars are "Spawn-points" for different personas of one person in the Metaverse. For good reasons we might want to have an Avatar which is significantly different than our physical representation.

The current experience of Metaverse, for instance, for meetings and workshops, is relatively weak. But we have to keep in mind that the current hardware has improved extremely during the last few years and is improving a lot.

A very important finding, we have to learn from the experiences of the past - the idea of Metaverse isn't completely new. Neohabitat was the first MMORPG released in 1985. Also, "Second life" from 2003 has several similarities with the Metaverse, but it had a couple of problems, like realistic geometry without teleporting. Therefore it ended up in 100.000s islands. Also, Metaverse won't be a 1:1 copy of the real world - why should we have photocopy machines in the Metaverse?

Our Avatar is separated from our physical body, but do we need a physical body? Recommendation to read about the "Bobiverse" - without the physical body, we are missing the ability to map the current experience to our experiences in the past.

We have to take care of the new attack vectors. A very intense experience has been shared - being in a Metaverse at a conference when one entity did very offensive and loud actions, but for the participants, there was no easy way out of that virtual room.