Thursday, January 20, 2011

Avatar control gets physical

It's been a while since I wrote about Second Life and I confess my visits to the virtual world have become all too seldom. I still find the whole concept fascinating but I simply don't have the contacts there that I used to have and I haven't found a reason for going there recently. However I found a short item on the SL blog New World Notes that shows a nice link-up between Second Life and Microsoft's new gesture-controlled gaming system Kinect.

Instead of controlling your SL avatar by mouse clicks you can use your body. Your avatar will imitate your physical gestures (within limitations of course). At present my avatar just stands passively all the time unless I prompt it by clicking on a gesture menu. If I could get it to mimic the way I really gesture this would add to the communicative potential of SL. Since body language and gestures are so crucial to communication maybe this is the way forward to making virtual worlds more compelling places for holding meetings.

Here's the video:

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