What Interoperability means for Marketers. Part 2. The avatar

Avatar appearance and the experience of moving from one world to another.

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For Interoperability (that’s the last time I write that in this post) to work, in other words, for people to actually use the service and shift from one world to another, a crucial element that needs to be addressed is the translation of an avatar’s attributes from one world to another.

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This process needs to be a smooth and seamless as possible in order to encourage adoption. And to complicate this further, there’s several elements involved….

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1. Avatar name

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Names (without sounding like I’m really stating the obvious here) are extremely personal things and just as important in the virtual world as the real world. In Second Life, when a new account is opened, you get to choose from a selection of surnames (mine is Whizenhunt) and then you can have any first name you like. That name is mine.

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Sign up with There and the process is slightly different. You can have any name you like, surname or first name or combination. In There my name is NicWhizenhunt. So far so good, as long as the name is available in the world you want to enter.

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However, there’s a problem looming here in terms of avatar names and IOB. Take the example of some corporate entities in SL. Cisco is a good example here. Employees from Cisco using SL for business purposes have to use a corporate naming convention – a surname of Ciscosystems. Cisco has liaised with Linden Lab to allow them their own surname. Importantly, only Cisco employees can use this surname.

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So what happens if an account was created in Kaneva, There or any world for that matter and the person creating the account called themselves ‘something’ Ciscosystems? Has that person breached a corporate branding policy?

What this is potentially leading towards is a centralised naming authority responsible for issuing and managing the names available for avatars. Sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t. We already have a similar process for the distribution and management of website and IP addresses.

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In any event, marketers will need to take a cross-world view on how they manage their corporate naming policies for avatars.

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And the issue of cross-world name management is just as important on a personal level. We’re nearing the age of virtual personalities in Second Life, with people developing brands of the back of their virtual activities. Tell these people that they can’t have the same name in a different world or that someone else has their name and there’s gonna be trouble – for trouble, read no demand for IOB.

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One solution here might be to prefix or suffix the name of the incoming avatar with the name of the world they’ve come from. This would be a method to allow multiple naming conventions. An issue here however might be a ‘foreigner’ mentality, prompted by displaying the fact that an avatar is visiting from another world.

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2. Appearance

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We like to look different. I’ve met people who have created Second Life accounts and got so obsessed with amending/personalising their appearance when they first entered that they didn’t even think about exploring the world.

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Some of the most popular and profitable metabrands in Second Life are clothing related. People make clothes, brand them and sell them. So, when I travel from SL into HiPiHi wearing the clothes I purchased in SL, what happens to the clothes?

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The process and concept of translating the avatar appearance from one world to another from a non-technical perspective is probably one of the most important areas to address.

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For brand owners already in virtual worlds that make available clothing or appearance-based products this is also of importance. This is because their products have been created (gone through a design process and been approved from a brand management perspective) using a set of tools created for one specific metaverse. Brand owners will not be happy if these products are reproduced to a lower standard than originally intended.

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3. Friend and group lists

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Social networks are a binding factor in virtual worlds. We have friends we’ve never met in the real world that we speak to on a regular basis virtually.

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So, as people start exploring different virtual worlds logically their friend lists will grow as they make friends with people in these worlds.

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True IOB in this context would mean that we have a single friends list populated and updated in real time with friends across multiple worlds.

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To be continued.