Instructor: Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie, University of Southern California  

Length: Half Day (Sunday morning)

Abstract

We navigate virtual worlds (VWs) with an embodied form called an avatar. Many VWs allow for extensive avatar personalization. This raises questions about the effect avatar use has on people inhabiting them, and also how the psychological affordances of avatars can be leveraged to make more meaningful and useful VWs. This tutorial covers history, form and functions of avatars in a range of VWs, including recent research about avatar use. Participants in this session will also be able to contribute to the development of an avatar investment metric being designed for use in future studies about avatars and VWs.

Title: 
 All About Avatars, and Why They Are Important

Length: Half Day (Sunday morning)

Speaker/Organizer: Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie, University of Southern California 

Description:

We navigate virtual worlds (VWs) with an embodied form called an avatar. Many VWs allow for extensive avatar personalization in ways never envisioned by early virtual reality system developers. This flexibility raises questions about the effect that avatar use has on the people inhabiting them, and also how the psychological affordances of avatars can be leveraged to make more meaningful and useful VWs. This tutorial covers the history, form and functions of avatars in a range of VWs, and includes a summarization of recent research about avatar use. Participants in this session will also be able to contribute to the development of an avatar investment metric being designed for use in future studies about avatars and VWs.

Instructor’s Bio:

Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie has worked in immersive technology since 1990, focusing on affective and meaningful applications of virtual environments and online virtual worlds. Since 2000 she has been a Senior Research Scientist at USC’s Inst. for Creative Technologies, working on multi-sensory immersive environments, and most recently on emplacing intelligent agents into Second Life for social and healing applications. She is a frequent speaker on immersive applications and has published widely at conferences and in journals on her virtual world work.  She is a director on the Executive Committee of ACM SIGGRAPH and founded the Digital Arts Community for this organization.