An interesting article from the National Science Foundation on Jeremy Bailenson’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford. For those of you who wondered why immersive online spaces such as Second Life seem compelling, at least to some people, read the article and watch the video. Food for thought.
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3 replies on “Why study avatars?”
I tried to build an avatar on Second Life the other day and was bored silly within 5 minutes. Even after watching the video and reading the article, I still can’t understand the appeal. Maybe I don’t feel attached because the avatar doesn’t have my face. Thank goodness! I just don’t get how Second Life is “fun.”
Every time we talk about Second Life and avatars I can’t stop remembering the movie Surrogates (2009, science-fiction, Bruce Willis), where people live trough theirs avatars and nobody gets out of their home anymore. This movie has an scene where a beautiful female avatar was actually a fat gay and it remembers me the joke of “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”.
The link in the original article is pointing to the wrong place now. Here’s the new link:
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/virtualself.jsp