Marc's Voice

The history of Avatars

I first heard the term ‘avatar’ back in the 80’s at some SIGGRAPH conference.  The term was used to refer to a 3d representation of one’s persona.  In the early 90’s a band named D’Kookoo used a 3D avatar in their act.  The 3d singing head would rotate, distort and juggulate to the beat, but it was very crude and it was hard to suspend disbelief in the character.

An avatar was a representation of who you were, a illustrated version of yourself.  But this singing head never really got beyond just being comical.  So it never really was ‘entertaining’ per se.   3D representation of humans always seemed so crude and non-realistic to me that I never suspended reality and dived into this make believe world that this 3D personified.  It always seemed strange to me.  Why 3d?  Couldn’t we have 2D avatars?

We even wrote in a 3D avatar into our MediaBand script.  The script writers I hired (Michael Kaplan and John Sanborn) convinced me that the lead singer of the MediaBand ‘band’ - was too shy to appear in public, so she hid behind the curtain and used an avatar to perform live.

So I tried to go down the 3D avatar route - but it never felt comfortable.

I always felt that 2D was fine.  Why does an avatar have to be 3D?  I started creating cartoon representations of myself, and used them in some ‘interactive TV’ talk show experiments I was working on in the early 90’s.  Broadband networking was still years away, but I knew that at some point we’d have the bandwidth necessary for video, real-time interaction and not have to worry about ‘dial-up’ connectivity.

Most people thought the ‘Marc Canter show‘ was some egotistically driven, vanity project designed to stroke my ego.  But in fact I needed SOME personality was needed to encompass my experiments in 2D avatars, and why not use my own face?  In fact I believe it was Roger McNamee who told me “why not use yourself?” So I did.

I knew at the time that having a measly 2d representation of one’s self was fine - thus was born the usage of the human face in a computer interface.  I believe the work we did on our MediaBar project was some of the FIRST implementations of including human faces into a computer interface (1995-1996.)

I never thought that avatars had to be 3D.  I liked the idea of just using a simple photo of one’s face - as their representation.  That’s what we used for our Mediabar platform.  The MediaBar was a ‘cyber theme restaurant’ operating system.  MediaBar was based on the fact that theme restaurants and location based entertainment would become such a major factor (as it gave us the ability to SIMULATE broadband connectivity YEARS before broadband would show up!) that having a development environment, test rig and series of deployed on-line applications and services - might actually be valuable back in 1996.

A key aspect of the MediaBar design was assuming that humans would want to ‘login’ to a table at a restaurant, order food and drinks, play multi-player games, listen to music, watch videos, ‘jack’ into the web, look up ‘facts’, and have  a desktop environment from which they could launch these apps and customize their environment.

We had our own drag and drop dashboard, which had ‘icons’ that represented each app or service and a way to customize the background image.  We built out a test rig at my home on Potrero Hill and threw some awesome parties!

That was 1996-97.

When one would ‘login’ the MediaBar their face would appear inside their interface.  And as other humans logged into the same table, their faces would appear as well.

This thing actually worked!

The goal was to understand how broadband computing and human faces would come together in an environment where entertainment and food would be coupled to on-line technology and information.  The MediaBar was applied research but I broke one fundamental rule of capitalism.

I used my own money.

One of the other kind of face/avatar based interfaces we developed was a food and drink ordering system.  When one would login, one of the main functions of the system was to keep track of what everyone had ordered.  And as multiple people logged into a single table, each of their faces would help keep track of what each person had ordered.  These ‘avatars’ were then used to total up one’s bill at the end of the meal.

We made the interface humorous by animating the food as it was ordered and attaching sound effects and little voice ’snippets’ to the animation, like “mmmm that’s good” or “I LOVE Coca-cola!”

So please - all you patent lawyers out there and patent clerks - please don’t even THINK about issuing any patents around the human face in a computer interface - I got the prior art on that!

In 2001 we were working on some interfaces to help rescue AOL.  We knew we had huge economies of scale to work with so we weren’t shy in coming up with some outrageous ideas.

One of them was to imagine what it would be like to have a ’shared TV viewing’ experience.  Folks would sit around a TV set in their virtual comfy chairs and their faces would be their ‘avatars’.

A chat room would allow everyone to communicate, and we even imagined that VoIP would be possible.  It all seemed so natural and obvious to us.  This interface (and the food ordering system) were created by someone named Joe Sparks.

At no time did we imagine that we needed these avatars to be in 3D computer graphics.  Video and photos worked just fine.

When social networking came along - I started to advocate the usage of one’s FACE in the social network. One’s profile page was the IDEAL place to display your 2D avatar and I remember yelling at Reid Hoffman that was was WRONG with LinkedIn was that it did NOT display the member’s face!

All social networking systems included one’s face and some of them called that face - an avatar.  Most simply called it “your photo”.  Or ‘your ‘image’.

Then came Second Life and the fulfillment of year’s of fantasy and expectations around 3D virtual realities. Secopnd life has gone through a tumultuous evolution and is back after a rebirth.

The term avatar was given new meaning.  And it’s about being 3D.

But we’re not done yet!  NOW the term Avatar has an even newer meaning.

Its an amazing movie. I highly recommend it to everyone.

Jim Cameron has gone one step further.  The term avatar is not just a 3D face anymore, it’s your entire body.  It reminds me of the Neal Stephenson book ‘Diamond Age‘ - when a human tutor is wired up with sensors - so that they can drive a 3D animated avatar in a learning book.

It’s amazing to look back and see how a simple term like avatar has morphed and evolved into what it is today.