DIY: what do you want your avatar to say

And where can you find one?

While psychologists are trying to figure out what your avatar says about you, I say what do you want your avatar (aka icon) to say. Do you want an image that approximates what you look like? Or one that makes a statement about your interests, philosophy, or general view of the world. Perhaps one with shock value will do nicely. You could decide on an animated one, although they can be quite annoying to some.

Before continuing further, let me say that I'm not talking about the kind of avatar that you drive in a virtual world or MMORPG. What I am talking about today is the icon or small picture that identifies you on a social site or forum.

Here are some examples of avatars seen on social media and found through Google's Image search ("avatars").

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left to right: four icons from findicons, oldtimersguild (Mr.Nubba),
biodegradablegeek, and NinaPaley 

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An article at Mashable--Avatars Everywhere--lists 27 sources for avatars. The list includes virtual worlds like Second Life and IMVU, which seem to me like a lot more work than necessary. Digibody's Caricature Maker is one I tried. See below.

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avatar made at Digibody's Caricature Maker

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There are a number of sites where you can create an avatar online using an uploaded photo. Picasion is one. It's pretty simple: you upload a photo, crop it, then save it to your computer. What I like being able to instantly see what the cropped photo will contain and select the size of the finished product. This site also offers you the opportunity to animate your photos.

Sizes of avatars differ from site to site--some want none larger that 100px, some want none smaller that 200px. What to do? One of my favorite apps for browsing images and doing some simple editing is FastStone Image Viewer. It's free for personal and educational use, and costs $34.95 for a lifetime, commercial license. This application will resize, change the resolution, and convert an image to a different file format.

A note to the wise: while I was looking at a variety of avatar generators, some wanted me to download an application. Not a good idea unless you know the site.

-- Marge

Bake fail equivalent

A bake fail in Second Life may seem trivial but it could be where we're headed in real life -- a point where what we know as real no longer resolves into what we see as real and vice versa. 

The term being applied to this moment is technological singularity and it seems to be fast approaching:

The technological singularity, or simply the singularity, is a theoretical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence, radically changing civilization, and perhaps human nature. Since the capabilities of such an intelligence may be difficult for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is often seen as an occurrence (akin to a gravitational singularity) beyond which the future course of human history is unpredictable or even unfathomable.

Mathematician John von Neumann (1903-1957) may have said it best.  He was the first to postulate singularity, calling it accelerating change. Stanislaw Ulam reports:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Ray Kurzweil -- author, inventor, futurist, a director of engineering at Google, and another supporter of the singularity theory -- wrote the book The Singularity Is Near, which is part fiction, part non-fiction.  In it he interviews 20 big thinkers like Marvin Minsky.

So far the references have been artificial intelligence and software, but hardware is also fast approaching a point of singularity, as exhibited by Moore's Law.

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Benzirpi, Microprocessor Transistor Counts & Moore's Law, Wikipedia

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Concerns about society being overwhelmed by rampant artificial intelligence (think SkyNet) are being addressed by such organizations as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI).

Personally, I wonder if our effectively living in virtual worlds, such as Second Life or your favorite MMORPG, is really preparing us for a completely virtual life.  Others are looking at the possibility, too.  Futurist Thomas Frey asks "Are We Destined to Merge With Our Avatars?"  And columnist James Wagner Au reports in New World Notes, "Scientists Testing to See if First Life is Really Second Life."  He, in turn is quoting an article in the Huffington Post:

The theory basically goes that any civilisation which could evolve to a 'post-human' stage would almost certainly learn to run simulations on the scale of a universe. And that given the size of reality - billions of worlds, around billions of suns - it is fairly likely that if this is possible, it has already happened.

Which in turn reminds me of the old, old theory, jokingly made, that our world is only a molecule in a frying pan.

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Mike, Technological Singularity, demotivationalposters.net

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-- Marge

Motion Capture

Motion Capture, aka mocap, is a technology that transfers the real-time motion of actual people and objects to virtual counterparts.  When you see mocap versus someone's idea of how something moves it's a pleasure to behold.

One of my favorite movies and the "first photorealistic computer animated feature film" is Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.  A truly fine example of motion capture is James Cameron's "Avatar":

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There are many sites offering motion capture services and a variety of software and tools, as well as differing technologies.  To get an idea of the variety, take a look at METAmotion.  For more information, there's also the Motion Capture Society.

If you want to try motion capture yourself, one of the easiest ways is to use Microsoft's XBox Kinect.  Here's some sample output, using iPi Soft desktop motion capture software (30 day free trial, $295 for express version in 2012):

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This last video is long, but shows in detail the process for producing a photorealistic, mocap game.  The game being produced is "Beyond: Two Souls" by Quantic Dreams; the release date is estimated to be Jan-Mar, 2013.

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Small white balls are dancing in front of my eyes, LOL.

-- Marge