Performing Avatar Gaze & Real Facial Animation in EQ2

A pandaren has been spotted. WoW Players rushing to the scene. MoP frenzy!

The timing, it’s perfect!

I actually wanted to write an article about performing gaze in WoW and whoopsie, I read on Spinksville that EverQuest 2 is allowing you to map real facial animation and voice fonts on to your avatar.

• Youtube: EverQuest II: Facial Recognition and Voice Modulation – SOE-mote

The reception amongst gamers doesn’t surprise me: “What? this is not a game mechanic? I am looking at my avatar from behind anyways!”.

However, MMO’s are incredibly social games, even if we discount the roleplay, which, as far as I can understand, this is meant for. It makes sense to me that a game company would eventually develop something like this, I guess I expected to see it in a virtual world like Second Life first… do they have this already?

Spinks herself posed an interesting question concerning immersion:

“I’m just not sure whether I prefer that CRPGs keep the communication fairly limited, its one of the things that makes them so good as escapist experiences. There was an originally a notion that your character in a virtual world was a character with a background and culture of its own (even if it wasn’t all that well detailed). The closer characters get to the players, the more that difference fades.”

I can see why voice could cross that boundary, but in terms of making your avatar smile when you smiled, I can only imagine how that would intensify your immersion, given that you can turn the feature off when you wanted to. I don’t look at my characters from the front that often either, but I could imagine conversation with other characters could be enriched by seeing them smile. When I saw the  video linked above, my thoughts were that your facial expressions are not for you, they are for whoever is looking at you.

Don’t we already perform gaze in WoW?

I believe we do.

Since a lot of characters don’t even have pupils, and since we have such limited control of our characters head and face movements, the best way to see where someone else is looking, is what they are targeting.

Sometimes a character will run past me and suddenly stop right before me. Sometimes they turn around facing me, sometimes they just stand with their backs to me. Usually they are inspecting me, of course I can see this if I target them and they have me targeted. I can also be sneaky and just /assist them, and jump straight to whoever they are targeting, without them knowing that I now know that they are targeting me, heh heh.

That’s the thing, someone could be looking at you, without even facing you. This stuff is confusing in WoW!

Identity crisis in Blue Mars

“Look, there’s that stalker I was telling you about”

I visited a (now closed down) virtual world a while ago called Blue Mars. Gaze was also something the developers there had experimented with, but in my opinion with creepy result.

Avatars, including my own, would acknowledge my presence by looking at me, a presence I didn’t believe I had, as I thought I was the lady in green on the picture to the right.

As you can see, she was uncomfortable with me walking behind her all the time, whispering behind my back with the other avatars. Seriously, in Blue Mars Avatars were like the machines in the Matrix, ready to take over the world!

“They didn’t even look at me”

With few exceptions, they did.

I’m talking about the WoW Factor Shows and the initial reason I wanted to return to the avatar gaze. Every event someone will not win a prize, limited amounts of gold and time on our hands means this is unavoidable. Even though we make sure to run back and forth between people and tell them that we’re 3-4 of us looking, someone still says “they didn’t even look at me” and 96% of the time, we did, but we’re obviously not conveying this well enough.

Last time we all sat down and spoke, I brought it up: “How do we convey to people that we are not ignoring them”. I suggested targeting them, even though you can tell what people are wearing by just looking at them, there’s an expectation, that they have not been properly looked at unless we also inspect them. Targeting people at the events could reassure them that someone did look at them, basically we need to perform gaze better!

WoW Factor Event from Earthen Ring-US, one of my favourite shows. There was not a single troll there, can you believe it? Not a single troll.

Then Elvine said something I had not thought of: “They think we’re not looking at them because they only see what I see”. Elvine runs the livestream, so his gaze is not cloaked like ours, his screen is his gaze, everyone can see exactly what, and especially who, Elvine is looking at.

Dammit! I thought I had the solution, but maybe avoiding people feeling ignored is not as easy as I thought.

But I would absolutely love to have facial animation in WoW! I would love to be able to perform gaze more accurately.

…Although, then everyone would know I walk around the events looking like this:

The 6th Shot (The WoW Screenshot Meme)

I was tagged by Jaedia and Kamalia to post a screenshot following these rules as stated by the birth-father Gnomeageddon:

• Go into your image folder
• Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.
• Publish the image! (and a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couldn’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own).
• Challenge six new bloggers.
• Link to them.

An excuse to post random pictures? Oh yes, I’m in! In fact, I took the liberty to post a few more that in some way adheres to the sixth rule.

The Sixth Image in the WoW Screenshot Folder

Apparently this screenshot was taken 1/1-11 at 20:22, a date that would satisfy anyone with an OCD for numbers.

Special WoW points to anyone who can spot me in the picture and bonus points to anyone who can also guess the location.

The Sixth Image in my Sixth Folder under my Image Folder

This is a picture of a cat taking a shower – a cat-shower. It’s a picture my mom sent me also about a year ago of their new cat Max.

Max was bought from a animal shelter, a “second-hand-cat”. He had been treated well by his previous owner, he wasn’t very old and now he needed a new home. The personnel at the shelter advised him to not be co-adopted with his sister, apparently she bullied him.

When my parents had visited the shelter to find a cat, Max had been very forthcoming and had put his pawn on my moms shoulders. When my mom told me this, I thought she was probably over-romanticizing, but when I met Max myself, he crawled directly onto my lap and purred, she had not been exaggerating. This was was the most loving and cuddly cat I had ever met, so trusting. He would cuddle up against their guests and the guests would instantly fall for him, everyone loved him. I recall my mom saying that she was afraid to lose him now, she had really lost her heart to Max, understandably.

A few months later Max doesn’t come home. He is castrated and has an ear tattoo (instead of a collar), there’s no reason he would stray nor that people should think he was a stray. My parents started to worry. They scouted the area and put up fliers without result. My mom’s fears had come true.

Max had just disappeared, and we have not seen nor heard of him since. He was extremely trusting of people he had never met before, so we don’t know if anyone picked him up and tried to re-adopt him, we’re fairly certain they could succeed. I think my parents got burned a little, they have still not acquired a new cat.

:(

The Sixth Image in my Sixth Folder under my Blog Folder

Hee hee, I pulled a blog specific picture too since I thought I would definitely be able to say something about it and here it is – my character in Blue Mars.

Blue Mars was a virtual world similar to Second Life, but as far as I know, they have closed down. I went there as part of a field trip with a group of Second Life residents, the organizer Vaneeesa Blaylock being a (mostly Second Life based) performance artist.

Everytime I’ve been to Second Life I’m reminded that they have the luxury of surnames. Blue Mars had surnames too, so I was not just Ironyca, but Ironyca Lee – yeah! If we had those in WoW, we would be able to actually spell each others names (Perhaps Hölipoowër and Dèæthfacé could have had an easier time).

Adding this picture to make a point. This was one of Vaneeesa's screenshots - Look at my avatar! LOOK - She is seriously disturbing! I'm glad she didn't have a voice, I don't ever want to hear it, *hides under blanket*.

My field report was written from a WoW-player’s perspective: WoW meets Blue Mars – about the Avatar Gaze.

It was a fun trip, slightly psychedelic as the pictures suggest – my character had a crush on me, I swear! If I turned my viewing angle in front of her, she would turn her head and look at me, often swaying back and forth changing pose while smiling flirtatiously. A so-called “out-of-avatar experience”.

Six Links

I went through my reader and tried to tag bloggers who have not yet been tagged.

1. Döra’s Log (I’m a huge fan of Döra… Döra are you still with us?)
2. Raging Monkeys (Love Syl’s writing)
3. I Rez Therefore I am (Hey, since I mentioned Vaneeesa, I might as well attempt to spread the meme to Second Life)
4. In Character (Recently subscribed)
5. Too Many Annas (Recently subscribed)
6. Cofessions of a Part-time Panzerkin (Recently subscribed)

WoW meets Blue Mars – about the Avatar Gaze

I’ve been to Blue Mars and I made it back alive. As you can see on the picture above, it was quite peaceful, except for a few things that creeped me out!

Firstly – what is Blue Mars?

Blue Mars is a 3D social virtual world platform. It’s much like Second Life in that you can build and add your own content and be a co-creator in this online world. Blue Mars is however very new compaired to the rest of the industry, we’re still participating in a launch beta, meaning a lot of it is not finished yet.

I went along with Vaneeesa Blaylock, the Second Life performance artist, who had invited people in her blog post Field Trip: Blue Mars to visit this new “planet”. Sadly my Blue Mars software was rather buggy, so I lost the tour group several times. To add to injury, I had befriended several people, but the interface doesn’t let you see which zone they are in. So I only managed to track them down again at the Welcome Area, which is pictured below.

What can Blue Mars bring to the table?

I’ve always found social platform worlds to be tricky. I’m not sure I completely understand them. As a gamer, I’m left with the big question “but what is there to do in there?“. Aside from the usual shopping and dressing up your avatar, I guess you can explore, chat with others and engage in minigames as bowling and golf, as I am on the picture below.

Blue Mars seems caught in between being something that doesn’t attract gamers (the shopping aspect) and trying to attract users from Second Life, which is very established already.

What can Blue Mars give us then?

I don’t know much about content creation, but I do know a little about the engine Blue Mars runs on, because it was originally made for a computer game (Shortly an engine is the framework upon which the game is built). The first person shooters Far Cry and Crysis both runs on versions of this engine, and are known to be very demanding on computers due to the neat graphics. I remember when gamers would relate to others how good their computer was, by how well it ran Crysis. I’m not a fan of first person shooters, so I’ve never played them, but I did get a small taste of the potential of the Cry Engine by faffing around in Blue Mars. It’s how it goes in the gaming industry, graphics go up up up, and Blue Mars delivers.

I went to the zone called ARAF, it’s a green tinted futuristic jungle like landscape, and I must admit I was utterly amazed at the beauty of the place. It was the first time in Blue Mars that I really felt like exploring this mythical looking scenery – so I did.

As a counterweight to my tingling curiousity, it was just that, scenery. No other avatars and no opportunities for interaction with anything in a meaningful way – from what I could see.

I take it as this place was more of an experimental playground to a designer.

A showcase of 3D landscape art.

It is stunning though, and I do wonder if the reason behind me feeling strangely at home there, had to do with the different similarities the zone had to a few zones within WoW (fx Feralas and Sholazar Basin).

My avatar looked completely out of place in in this emerald fantasy though, and I found myself wishing for a nice staff and a hood to go with the style, so I wouldn’t look like such a tourist! As long as you don’t own land in Blue Mars, maybe are you just that – an earthling visiting.

I think my avatar might have a crush on me!

At least she kept looking at me! I have always thought of an avatar as a virtual representation of me in cyberspace, but perhaps Blue Mars disagrees. To me, the identity immersion was completely broken by the fact my avatar liked to look at me (i.e. gaze at the “camera”), and sometimes her posing even looked flirtatious.

I was highly disturbed by the fact, that my idea of her and me being the same was thrown overboard, when she continously decided to turn her head and smile at me. If she is looking at ME, I can’t be HER.

What am I then? I guess I’m the weird pervert who follows her, mostly from behind, controlling her every move? Well..  she seemed fine with it…

I should add that other avatars gaze back as well if you turn your camera to be in front of them, even to the point it feels like they could be whispering about you, right in front of you.

The environmental sounds also followed the camera, and not my avatar. I discovered this when I kept triggering a sound of water dripping whenever I changed the viewing angle on my avatar. It turned out, it was the fountain next to my “camera”, which lead to me conclude, that I, as this ethereal stalker, also have a hearing sense besides my evident ability to see things through my lense.

My feeling of being behind a camera became even more accentuated when I noticed this effect of water running down the “lense”, whenever I had submerged my “camera” under water, and brought it back up again. I’m not sure what effect they wanted when they put that in, and I can only assume it’s meant to add a sense of liquid realism to the element of water.

In WoW I never get stared at, in fact, catching a chatacters eye can be difficult, especially when some races don’t even have pupils! It was a very special experience to me, when I compare it the place I come from, where the view of the camera isn’t given any individual presence. I wonder if they are going to keep these paparazzi features in permanently.

It could also just be a case of what Vaneeesa coined as “an out of avatar experience”.

Hello Blue Mars – Meet The Sims

The controls in Blue Mars are very simple and easy to learn, as is the interface. There was one thing I could have wished for still: I wish they had studied The Sims series.

The Sims is a game, and Blue Mars isn’t entirely, but they still have a lot in common. The Sims fx have something called “pathing”. Without pathing, your avatar will walk in a straight line to the destination you clicked (the blue cone in Blue Mars), including getting stuck on whatever is in their way. With pathing your avatar will get to the point you designated by choosing the shortest path, thus being able to turn around fx corners by themselves. I’m lazy and prefer it when my avatar can do all the hard work for me.

Of course this meant that in Blue Mars, moving around narrow places could be dodgy at times, with my avatar looking very silly walking into pot plants and furniture. In Blue Mars, navigating in a house like this one below (from Sims 3), would be a challenge.

The lack of pathing really puts pressure on designers to make places that are not only beautiful, but also functional in terms of effortless movement.

I also wish Blue Mars had taken a look at The Sims when it came to avatar motions and expressions. I like when my avatars go nuts, scream of laughter and slap their thighs. I want them to do a summersault when they celebrate, and cry to the heavens when they are upset.

Here Ironyca is doing a cry emote. Is she crying? Or just looking at her hand?

Since I know Blue Mars is not finished yet, I hope they will add more expressive emotes and less expressive posing and walking. I think everybody noted how fidgety our avatars were while especially sitting, constantly changing position. Walking and running from the female avatar perspective is much like a model stride, like Vaneeesa put it: “I run like Yasmene Bleeth in Baywatch”.

Virtual World or Virtual Zones?

Whenever you want to travel somewhere else in Blue Mars, you don’t take a flightpath or ride your mount, you change zone. It’s fast and gives a nice overview like the picture to the left.

Coming from WoW I lose the sense of world and gain the feeling of instance. Zones are not in relation to each other, and you can’t go directly from one to the other. Instead, every zone seems to have a theme and you download the whole thing before you enter it, leaving your latency relatively low.

I wonder if the houses in Caledonia above are meant for future Martian residents. At the time being, all the zones I visited felt a little empty. I wasn’t able to find any populated domestic area, but maybe that’s in the future.

Based on my experience in Blue Mars, I’d give it some time to get settled and then plug back into it, to see it in it’s full splendor. There’s definately potential and the visual side is alluring.

If some crazy designer would whip up another aesthetic wonder like ARAF, I will be there – with my hood and staff!