STRIKE A POSE

Re-working the range of avatar expressiveness one cube at a time...

The sexy story of Phil Murdock and Snow Hare last week actually began, as many New World Notes stories do, with something entirely different. I met Phil and Snow during a demonstration of PoseCubes, a new avatar animation technology from Hiro Pendragon, which they are implementing into a new furniture line.

Hiro's goal is to replace Poseballs, the unwieldy little spheres that have become the community-standard method of automatically animating an avatar when the user sits on them. Trouble is, a Poseball can carry only one animation, so if you want avatars to go through a gamut of positions and animations in a single space, the solution is to toss in more and more Poseballs, until the place starts to look like a multi-colored explosion of Nerf balls.

"This is a project I thought up back in October," Hiro tells me, while Phil and Snow go through a variety of poses on the couch next to us. "I saw how inflexible Poseballs were, and how laggy."

His solution embeds multiple animations (up to fifty) into a single primitive, and enables the user to assign key text phrases to each. (And since they're on a prim, they can be disguised as throw pillows or other objects that fit the situation.)

I was skeptical that all this was possible, so I gave Hiro the text of a soliloquy from, well, Hamlet, and challenged him to incorporate some dozen animations into it. In a few days, he came back with a Posecube for me to wear sit on, and built a stage for me to stand on, while I typed Hamlet's "Oh what a rogue and peasant slave..." soliloquy in the chat window, line by line. On every trigger cue, my avatar bounded across the stage or shifted positions-- at "Who calls me villain?", looking around suspisciously; at "About, my brain!", sitting down and thinking furiously, and so on.

"[T]he idea behind the phrases is that changing poses can be worked into natural conversation," Hiro tells me later. "In real life, people fidget, people move around a bit, people cross their legs, lean to the side. Animators can now make all of these animations, and suddenly BODY LANGUAGE is capable in SL."

Because in here, if you want to incorporate the thousand natural fidgets that flesh is heir to, you need to write them into the script first.