Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Transworlders of the Worlds Unite!

I sketched this image last year to visualize a trend I was seeing in the movement of identities between worlds.

Today, avatar identities created initially in Second Life are even more widely travelled and have large, established communities on human-centric social networking and sharing sites like Ning, Facebook, Flickr and Plurk, and Virtual Worlds such as Twinity, Metaplace and ReactionGrid, to name a few.

Although we are a diverse group, I believe we have common concerns and it makes sense to work together to pursue mutual aims, such as interoperability and the right to move our virtual assets between worlds.
Since every interest-group needs a name and catchy slogan, I propose "Transworlders: Avatars Everywhere!"
A new class of sites are opening that support Transworlders in the movement of avatars and virtual assets between worlds. I think that such services will become increasingly important to those of us with consistent avatar identities that move between many worlds:
Botgirl Clone 3
  • Evolver allows you to create 3D avatars from 2D images and then export to a wide variety of formats that can be imported into Virtual Worlds, graphic formats (such as the embeddable image here) or even a Physical World action figure!
  • Animeeple and Mixamo can import an avatar, help you create animations, and then export the animations for use in virtual worlds, videos, images or other animation programs.
  • Second Inventory allows you to move digital assets including shape, skin and inventory between Second Life and Open Sim virtual worlds.
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    I created a Transworlders Community Site on Ning as I was writing this post. It's just a shell at the moment, but feel free to join and start posting.

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