Meet your
virtual double
By BBC News Online internet
reporter Mark Ward
Monday, 6 November, 2000, 12:57 GMT
A
computerized version of you could soon be sitting in
cyberspace, attending meetings and conferences on your
behalf.
BT is developing a system that adds
digital doubles, or avatars, to online and telephone
conferences to restore human interaction to remote
meetings and make them more productive.
Such computer surrogates are becoming
more common, and some are already in use reading the
news or dispensing advice to consumers navigating
through websites.
BT will launch its avatar service next
summer.
Cyberspace clones
Researchers at BT's research labs at
Martlesham in Suffolk, UK, are developing software that
adds animated avatars to its existing teleconferencing
system.
Channel 5 newsreader Andrea
Catherwood
|
Already, anyone setting up a telephone
conference with BT can use an associated virtual meeting
room populated with icons representing the people taking
part.
The real people participating in the
conference can see what is happening in their virtual
meeting room via the BT Conferencing website.
The icons let the participants know
who is chairing the meeting and who is currently
speaking.
Gesture politics
BT wants to replace the icons with
something more realistic to make the meetings resemble
more familiar face-to-face encounters.
BT favours avatars because it is
easier to send a small command to make an avatar perform
a gesture than it is to stream the video images of a
real person performing the same movement.
Good quality video images require fast
network connections and many of the people joining
teleconferences dial in from home over slow lines.
The BT researchers are equipping the
avatars with a range of behaviours that make them appear
vaguely human.
Pay attention
When the avatars first appear, they
walk into the virtual room and take a seat around the
conference table. New entrants to a conference are
welcomed with a wave, and anyone wanting to speak tells
their avatar to put up their hand to get the attention
of the chairman.
Michael Jewell, one of the developers
of the conferencing avatars, said BT had been trialling
the system among its own staff for a couple of months.
"It gives people a great sense that they are in a
meeting," he said "They become much more
involved because they can identify with the people in
that meeting."
The avatars will also make it harder
to avoid boring meetings. The avatar of anyone who looks
at other windows on their PC while a meeting is going on
will appear to pick up a sheaf of papers and read them.
Avatars everywhere
Now the BT researchers are working on
making the avatars more lifelike by adding more
mannerisms and ways for people to tailor the appearance
of their avatar.
The company is also planning to let
people use the avatars they created of themselves in the
Talkzone at the Millennium Dome in London. Channel 5
newsreader Andrea Catherwood was one of the more
well-known avatars created using by this method.
BT is not the only company using
avatars. Ananova the avatar reads the news on the
website with the same name, and ill-fated fashion
website boo.com used an avatar called Miss Boo to help
customers navigate its website.
Other companies such as Extempo are
developing more sophisticated avatars that can hold
conversations with surfers. Companies such as Procter
and Gamble are already using its technology to give
advice to customers.
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