Good thoughts here. Communication in VWs is often spoken of as if it's as rich as communication in real life, but that's just not the case, as you illustrate. Except in There.com, it's not a synchronous medium, and loses a lot of the power that synchronous communication has. One way players in some games have overcome part of this problem, of course, is with TeamSpeak and other VoIP tools. These have become indispensable in a game like EVE, where large numbers of players have to be tightly coordinated, but that's a slightly different story; that's specifically military-oriented communication, not the kind of "enhanced chat room" communication you're talking about here.

That said, it should be pointed out that two things on your second list (8. Hold gestures, and 9. Tightly coordinate gestures and talk) are already possible and have been implemented in Second Life. Residents can design or buy custom animations and poses that have adjustable durations, and can tie those things to words appearing in their chat.

Mark, thanks for your comments. Second Life is indeed an interesting place since players can create features that the devs didn't think of/implement. For example, I've seen player-created cell phones in SL that come complete with the animation for holding it to the avatar's ear and a busy message that says "Sorry I'm currently in an IM" when you go into Busy or Away mode. This is nearly what I want except I want the phone to be automatically activated when I open an IM window.

In terms of the durations of avatar animations in SL, I think you're referring to the fact that users can 'edit' an animation and adjust the duration (correct me if I'm wrong). I'm talking about something different. By "holding" the gesture, I mean adjusting the duration on the fly, rather than in advance, in response to what the recipient of the gesture is doing at that moment. If it appears that you're not noticing my pointing, I just want to be able to hold down a key until you do notice. I won't have time to open the animation editor and increase the duration of my pointing.

Ooh, that's a great idea for a feature, Bob, and you're right, I didn't get that on my first read.

It is possible to do something like this in SL, but it involves a "start/end" dialogue box rather than just a key-press, which would obviously be an easier way to work it. Also, you can turn animations on/off through slash commands entered on the chat line (that don't show up in chat). But you're right, there's no seamless way to do what you describe at this point, and it would be a great feature.

Hey Bob,

I certainly think your ideas are worthy of consideration, and are of much interest in the HCI community. Indeed, gaze and gesture are important for non-2D interfaces. Items 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 8 really ought to be standard in virtual environments, and it's a shame that so many good VEs lack such features.

But I think that some of these ideas are actually counter-intuitive for working within a virtual environment. For example, tracking multiple conversations in real life is an intensive task, but can be made exceptionally simple in a VE through the use of multiple chat panes, chat histories, and filters. A "busy" signal is almost irrelevant, because tracking when a user is involved in a conversation is no longer a binary operation, and best left to the user to handle.

Another issue is one of detail. Screen interfaces are unbelievably limited for the human eye to track details of expressional nuance whilst still trying to make sense of a wider visual scene. The decoupling of the user's view from the avatar's is a natural extension of this limited resolution.

With large surround screens capable of imparting more information, the ability to display facial expressions will take on much greater meaning, until then the only real method will be to either constrain the visual field to an avatar with which the user us interacting, or to provide a close-up in another pane. Of course, either of these solutions is only of use for two-way conversation, and would break down in multi-party interaction.

It's worth noting that not a single player of EQ2 I know has found the facial expressions of any use, mostly because they normally employ a wider visual field that doesn't allow such details to be resolved. It's a neat gimmick that everyone comments on the first time they zoom in upon another player, but it quickly fades from notice.

Real-time motion capture is a desirable method of human-computer interaction, but within the context of a real-time virtual environment requires such processing and network overheads that it would destroy the interactivity of any simulation. I'd point to Second Life as a perfect example of how even pre-recorded motion capture is transmitted so poorly that it destroys any immersive aspects of a VE. Transmitting real-time motion capture to every client within visible range will be a difficult technical challenge to overcome, and will lag far behind the expressive capacity of pre-recorded capture.

There's a pertinent article at Cognitive Daily on why we look away during a conversation.

A couple of interesting points from the article:

• People (well, kids actually in the experiment) look away more often in face-to-face conversations than in a real-time video link; so maybe avatars staring at each other isn't too bad.
  
• It seems people look away mostly because they're self-conscious or embarassed OR because they're trying to concentrate on a difficult question.

Not sure how we could simulate this in avatars, since it's pretty difficult to judge when the person is self-conscious or trying to concentrate.

Look at the speaker

Back in WoW's beta the characters looked toward their targets as it happens in the other examples.

I still wonder why they removed that feature. It was really cool.

About other minor details: still WoW did already something with the chat bubbles and some standard graphical emotes while speaking in public or yelling.

If I was a dev I'd focus more on the physical perception of the body (better controls, movement, consistence/solidity etc..) rather than the communication.

What I'd really like is for vendor NPCs to actually have tables, cabinets, and other assorted paraphernalia associated with a shop. Nothing breaks immersion like a guy standing around with a few metric tons of iron ore strapped to his belt :)

(Sylvie, sorry for the long delay in posting your comment. Our filter thought your post looked too much like a comment bot. :P)

Sylvie, thanks for the link! That's an interesting study. My main point is simply that having avatars *lock* eye gaze when each is selected (e.g., SWG or EQII) doesn't look and feel like face-to-face conversation. It would look more "natural" if the avatars automatically looked away briefly and periodically. And studies suggest that the *speakers* should look away more often than the listeners. Thanks.

Hi Seb, thank you for all your comments. Let me clarify a few points.

People in HCI and CSCW working on "awareness" are trying to tackle the problem of managing "interruptions" from IM. That is, developing ways of telling you that the person you're about to send an IM is currently busy with some activity. (You can still send the IM if you choose, but at least you know better what to expect in terms of a response.) I'm suggesting that such "awareness" information is just as useful in virtual worlds, and it is somewhat easier to implement because in many cases the system already knows what the other player is busy doing.

Take those situations in which a friend of yours can see that you are logged on and that you are not replying to his IMs. If the system tells him that you're "currently in another conversation," it gives him more clues as to why you're ignoring him. (Note, the system could still let his message through, but it does the work of telling him "hang on a sec" for you.)

I totally agree that with today's virtual worlds, players *should* be given the power to decouple their view from the avatar and in many cases "fix" their view when important things are occluded. My point is simply to provide an indicator to tell other players when I'm "not looking" so they won't bother to do a gesture or something in front of my avatar that I wont' see.

Do you mean SWG? EQII replaces facial expressions with gross bodily gestures. For example, "/smile" makes your avatar swing its arm in a "ho hum" sort of way. In SWG, where there are lots of facial animations, I find that people tend to use the text emotes (e.g., "Bob smiles at Seb") that go with the facial expression, but they generally can't see the animations themselves.

Finally, I don't know how much real-time mo-cap would slow down an MMORPG today, but I hear the technology is coming in the near future. I simply want to point out that *if* you ever want to enable players to gesture *freely,* you'll probably need something like real-time mo-cap. The other alternative is complex controls for manipulating every part of the avatar which is probably too hard for users.

Thanks for your feedback!

Seb,
One more thing, separate "chat panes" do indeed make it easier for players to manage multiple conversations simultaneously as you point out. The problem is, most MMORPGs don't use them. (I've only seen them in Second Life and There.) For example, WoW, SWG and EQII mix up all of the private "tells" in the same chat pane.

Also, the fact that MMORPG lingo includes the term "tell hell" to refer to occasions on which you are overwhelmed with managing multiple private conversations strongly suggests that players at times find this annoying.

In my experience, There avatars support 8 out of 10 of the points above. Only points 6 and 8 are not supported. My experience chatting using voice in There has been way more immersive than any other avatar-based interaction I have had in any other virtual world.

Voice Recognition software is good enough nowadays -- why not encorporate that into the "tells"?

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