Meez.com

I've just created this blog and this is my first post. I've been populating my virtual space with widgets, badges, chicklets, etc. My favorite addition thus far is my Meez.com avatar. To commemorate his birthday this Saturday 10th of November 2007 I decided to dedicate this post to Meez.com and avatars in general.

I'm not sure how our virtual selves came to be known as avatars. This may not be a widely known fact, but Avatars are in fact mortal incarnations of deities. I confirmed this with the dictionary but I actually knew the general definition beforehand; just one example of the snippets of knowledge that are acquired by playing and/or reading fantasy games/books. In this case, Magic the Gathering. I used to play, and can remember "Creature" playing cards titled, for example, "Avatar of Hope." Typically the card illustrations involved a form of mythical creature — the Avatar of Hope, for example, is a winged centaur.

Christ may very well be the most famous Avatar if you believe in the gospel.

The evolution of the definition of the word Avatar may have to do with the underlying concept of an entity traveling to a different (lower) realm. In its original meaning Avatars descended onto the earth from a celestial (or infernal) realm. It could be argued that modern avatars, as online representations of a "real" entity, also traverse from the realm of reality to the Internet.

Meez is great, even in its beta it provides significant avatar building flexibility. Perhaps their most appealing quality is the ability to animate your avatar. The one thing they currently lack, relative to their competitors, is voice recording to provide your avatar with a message.

As I browsed avatar applications and pondered on their current, and future, utility I began to appreciate their potential — avatars it seems are at their infancy. They are currently used for decoration more than anything, something which I think will change. Eventually they could be an integral part of the way we present ourselves in virtual spaces—almost like a business card.

Some future utilities that I hope Meez (or other avatar applications) will develop include:

- Facial recognition software. To sidestep much of the avatar customization (this technology already exists actually).
- Avatar interaction. To be used when two avatars meet in a single virtual space. It would be very interesting if, for example, an avatar’s background at a blog became populated with the avatars of readers as they visited the page.
- Dynamic backgrounds. This ties back to the previous bullet. Wireless triangulation already exists, and can be used to determine the location of a mobile phone user. It would be interesting if this information could be pulled to change an avatar’s background as his/her owner traveled between (or within) cities.
- It might also be interesting if we could, for instance, visualize products and services of interest through our avatar. I’m imagining an avatar application that would pull click-through information or del.icio.us tag information to populate an avatar’s space with products that a user may be have, want, or be interested in.

It will be interesting to see where this all goes.