Traces: Semi-Autonomous Avatars

Avatars are generally thought of as a direct representation of a user in a virtual environment. But as the complexity of virtual en- vironments increases and, with it, the scope and complexity of possi- ble avatar behavior, it becomes more and more difficult to mai ntain a direct correlation between the user's wishes and the avatar 's actions. Instead of this now inadequate notion of 'avatar-equals-user,' we pro- pose that avatars can be fruitfully thought of as semi-autonomous agents, which have their own behaviors and intentionality, but are intimately tied to the user's actions. We describe a system i ncorpo- rating avatars with varying levels of autonomy: Traces, a Virtual Re- ality system in which a user's body movements spawn avatars w hich gradually become more autonomous. The formulation of avatars as semi-autonomous agents opens a new and rich conceptual space in the design of virtual environments. In this context, the currently dominant metaphor of "user avatar" is no longer adequate to describe or innovatively solve prob- lems that come up in designing avatars. In this paper, we propose that in the context of current trends in avatar research, avatars can be more fruitfully thought of as semi-autonomous agents. Avatars are thought of as agents like any other with their own behavior and intentional- ity, but with a particularly intimate relationship with the human user. This notion of avatar not only describes current avatar work more accurately, but also widens the conceptual space of possible avatars. Avatars can now appear on the full range of autonomy levels, from a fully passive traditional avatar to a fully active traditi onal agent. In this paper, we will describe our experience with Traces, a Virtual Reality system we have built which allows the user to interact with a series of 3-dimensional avatars of increasing autonomy