Gesture and Narrative Creation in Avatar-Based 3D Virtual Communities

17th April, 2001. 4.15pm-6.15pm. CSLI, Cordura room 100
Steve DiPaola
SUDAC, Dept of Art, Stanford University
Steve DiPaola will discuss his years of work with an avatar-based 3D virtual community that emulates many natural social metaphors but has extended and adapted many of these metaphors as its very tight-nit community of users has evolved over the years. OnLive Traveler and its communities use voice based emotive head avatars in online 3D virtual environments of their own creation. The community has evolved a very specific gesture and expression language that uses voice and 3D space in a socially complex manner.

Steve will discuss the original design goals of creating this system originally for a commercial start-up, how those goals succeeded and failed over the years and how ultimately the community members independently evolved expressively rich conventions of gesture, expression and emotional creation for their own personal inter-relationship needs.

As part of the demonstration, (barring technical problems) we will interact with the community members online and bring their thoughts of expression and gesture into our discussion.


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Last modified: Fri Oct 26 19:56:59 PDT 2001 by sgill@Turing.Stanford.EDU