Discussion on avatar identity and "personhood" using papers by Tom Boellstorff and James Paul Gee as a basis...  in the Cloud Space discussion area over Holyrood Park in the Vue South region in Second Life.

Reading Boellstorff (2008) and his stories of virtual world encounters.... I have some related observations. This may get a bit deep and multi-layered.. I like layers of storytelling and meaning :-)

Some of you may (or may not) have noticed that my avatar changed appearance during the Second Life building tutorial this week. My normal bearded avatar and flight suit outfit (there is a whole history behind that too) .. changed to be a little red round ball. Why?

When "I" (Austin) am "he" (Ai) he normally shows attention and is responsive to what is happening around. I do not like "busy" and "afk" indicators and prefer to log out - or go elsewhere in world. I am not happy to leave my avatar unattended and feel it would be rude to do so... though I have no problem with others adopting that style of use of virtual worlds.

For a few years I used some text only and mobile device or low bandwidth non-graphical clients like Radegast and iPad's Pocket Metaverse. I was always unhappy that I had no idea what my avatar would look like, how it would be positioned, that it might face wrongly to those I interacted with, and it was difficult to make the avatar appear such that it was clear I was on a text chat/IM only client.

So I put some effort into designing an avatar that reflected this state of affairs. This was a Personal Satellite Assistant (PSA)... a real device NASA is working on for the Space Station that uses AI technology. It acts as an assistant to relay messages, give instructions and help, and record via camera things going on in experiments in the Space Station. It hovers near astronauts to help them, or can be sent to perform tasks. It has a screen on its front to show astronauts images, video, messages, etc. I have explicit permission from NASA Ames Research Lab to use the image of the skin of this device in my work and in virtual worlds .

I have used a sphere with this PSA skin for a number of AI driven and autonomous devices in Second Life for several years. Enter any I-Room (http://openvce.net/iroom) and there will usually be one at the entrance to act as a greeter or sensor sending back visitor and status information to our intelligent system over the web.

So I created the Ai PSA Avatar with the PSA shape, size and skin, and showed on the screen a portrait image of "Ai" to show its him that is watching as if over a video teleconference link - i.e. not immersive and "in world" fully.

Even though not on a low bandwidth or text client at the SL building tutorial, my attention was elsewhere. In fact my camera was not even in the same region as the tutorial space. I was looking at an object in a distant region that had the properties I wanted to copy to replicate a complex object I did not know how to build. But I did not feel comfortable just leaving "Ai" unattended... and did not want to fly away to get the information. I have the same issue when I am looking at web pages, or using other applications alongside the Second Life viewer. This was a case when it felt exactly right to use the Ai PSA avatar.

I see this as "Ai" looking through the "PSA" robot floating in the meeting space... "I" am behind "Ai" but its "Ai" that is disconnected from the meeting space.

Boellstorff, T. (2008). Personhood. In Coming of Age in Second Life (pp. 118-150). Oxford: Princeton University Press.

[First posted on IDEL11 Discussion Forum, 19-Oct-2011]

Avatar Identity exercise - are the avatar clones me, us or them? See http://atate.org/ai/ai/ for more...

I am sitting in on the distance learning MSc Introduction to AI Class at Stanford - http://www.ai-class.com/ - to observe the way they use technolgy for distance education. They seem to make very good use of short multiple choice answers and "click over the options" type quizzes after each brief video segment to make sure people are understanding.  I also see they will be using "badges" to show progress in the class and its assignments.

For those of you that have not heard of this... its believed to be the largest distance learning class ever - with 150,000 registered students.

Browser incompatibility with served web pages and web content has been an issue for some time since multiple browsers and platforms have become available.  HTML itself was designed to allow for multiple possible renderings to allow for differences of display device, etc.  But as web pages have used proprietary content (e.g. Flash) and used progressively more complex scripting (e.g. JavaScript), style sheet variants (e.g. CSS) and other platform dependant content, and as specialized versions of web pages for mobile devices have appeared, the things have recently become much worse. 

We often get pages partially rendered, but see the message "Done, but with errors on page" showing in the browser status bar.  This is often due to JavaScript or other underling errors... an example, taken from the Holyrood Park Blog site itself, might look like this if you open the diagnostics window...

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0;
chromeframe; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; InfoPath.1;
.NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET4.0C)
Timestamp: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:18:06 UTC

Message: Object expected
Line: 2 Char: 1 Code: 0
URI: http://edc11.education.ed.ac.uk/.../northern-web-coders/js/dropmenu.js

A serious problem is that pages are getting richer in content, but page developers are failing to test in multiple browsers, consider different bandwidth devices, different size screen failing to provide fall back styles where they sue advanced facilities, etc. 

White Screen of Death by waiting...

Another issue is that page developers, and most content management systems and social network style web pages are laid out in ways that mean the page does not render until most of the content has been downloaded to the browser.  Where the page contains many thumbnails, images, and other large volume content this can mean the user sees a blank screen for a long time on slower links before the whole page is shown.  Progressive rendering of downloaded content is not possible if the style typical of social network web pages is adopted.  The developers of those web pages and styles often fail to set image and table/element pre-size indicators which means the content has to be loaded before the browser can decide on the layout position.

Attended tutorial on Holyrood Park in "The Grove" campfire tutorial space on Vue facilities in Second Life.  This is Ai arriving from above looking down over the Vue regions, and then in the meeting.

 

MSc in e-Learning IDEL11 Module - Virtual Worlds in Education section... tutorial for new avatars and to get used to the facilities on Virtual University of Edinburgh (Vue) given by Frank Lassard and Pancha Enzyme...