Putting a Face on Things - Putting a Face on Things - page 7

the most popular and lasting virtual worlds. Internationally, Korea, Finland, Japan, and
China all have major offerings in the virtual worlds. From Japan, the Hello Kitty vir-
tual world came online in 2007. Habbo Hotel, the Finnish-server young adult world,
became the first virtual world with its own Hollywood agent in 2008.
In terms of avatars and virtual worlds in a narrow sense, particularly in Western
countries, children and young adults adopted them in great numbers and ease. For
adults it remained largely an alien technology, used by people on the fringe of the cul-
ture. As I describe in looking at the Second Life hype cycle (see chapter 1), the media
coverage of virtual world properties subsided after this three year period (2005-2008)
of explosive growth and attention. We find in 2011 a virtual world landscape described
by robust participation in fantasy, fighting, and other game worlds and expansive
growth in what I describe as another kind of avatar engagement: social media such as
profile pages, VoIP, IM, and SMS. In effect, we practiced in the early years of avatar
adoption how a broader adoption of pervasive media might work.
3D Web
Whether you know it or not—and most people have had little reason to pay atten-
tion—the 3D web made a strong showing in 1998. The 3D web indicates a shift from
a text-based Internet to a graphical one, and one that is three-dimensional in terms of
how information is configured. We do not yet have a fully functional 3D web, and it
remains debatable whether we would truly desire to have a majority of our interactions
augmented with dimensionality. Nonetheless, in 1998, when the second international
Virtual Worlds conference of computer scientists and media designers met in Paris, the
discussion focused on engaging the social aspect of network relations as a newfound
power as well as on the graphical explosion in interactive design. In a sense, everything
that we see currently from 3D animated avatars to persistent virtual worlds was test
driven a decade ago.
By the time of the Paris conference several commercial virtual world platforms ex-
isted in addition to the ones designed for research purposes. AlphaWorld, The Palace,
Onlive!, all had opened up shop for public use with 3D interface and avatars. 12 Busi-
ness schools published papers mentioning Blaxxun Interactive's Community as a rich
model for real-world training. Sony's Community Place foreshadowed by a decade its
recent PlayStation-console virtual world called Home . Computer scientists and seg-