> You have a date with person X in the library and you are waiting for her
> there, but then person Y needs your help down at the arcade hall. That
> is, your primary task of waiting for person X is interupted. A multi
> embodiement solution would be to leave a body for person X, while your
> newly cloned body walks down to person Y. By doing this, person X will
> see that you are waiting for her, while person Y gets your attention.
Yes, thats one of the types of scenarios I was imagining.
One thing thats emerged from the use of MASSIVE is that its relatively
common for users to be distracted by events in the real-world (phone,
talking to someone in the same room). It can be quite embarrasing/annoying
to be talking to someone in MASSIVE and then find out that the owner of the
embodiment has gone for a cup of coffe :-) This lead to Chris Greenhalgh
adding a "sleep" option (which places your embodiment in a sleeping
position) so that if you do get distracted you can signal other users that
you're temporarily unavailable.
One of Chris's students extended MASSIVE so that you can leave a
persistant embodiment behind when they leave a world. This embodiment could
do sevral things:
- inform other users that you are not currently present in the world
- record messages to be be relayed to you.
- signal you that someone in the world wished to speak with you.
> In this small example, the avatar is not only limbs and eyes of the
> user, but a visualization of the user's state and an indicator of future
> actions that he may persue. Because only one of the bodies may have the
> full attention of the user at a time, the state of the body should be
> visible, so that other users can get an idea of what kind of interaction
> is possible, and for how long they have to wait to get a response.
Agreed.
Kai, do you feel like summarising your paper "Distorted, disjointed and
multiple embodiments"? Is it available on-line?
> Some possible states:
> 1. Dead. never to return.
A digression...
One slightly amusing "feature" of DIVE is that when someone's visualizer
crashes it tends to leave a "corpse" embodiment in the world. A convention
has evolved in which the surviving users "bury" these corpses under the
ground plane to keep them out of the way.
> 2. Unbreakable trance. possible reactivation, but cannot be signalled.
> (that is, you cannot get the attention of the user)
> 3. Breakable trance. You may signal the user and get his attention.
> 4. Monitoring. The user is able to see/read what the avatar sees, but
> are not currently using it for any activity.
> 5. Active. Full interaction.
cheers
Dave
-- Dave Snowdon Communications Research Group Tel: +44 (0)115 9514226 Department of Computer Science Fax: +44 (0)115 9514254 The University of Nottingham E-mail: dns@cs.nott.ac.uk Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK <http://www.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/~dns/dave.html>"This mind intentionally left blank"