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Avatars as Our Agents

January 4, 2007 by Jim Parker in avatar, future, technology

Avatars will become our agents, handling all contacts with the world when we don’t want to or when we can’t.

We can’t be everywhere all of the time.  But we want to be.  Back in the day, we purchased answering machines, and then voice mail.  These were (are) a very simple way of communicating to anyone the following:

1. Hello
2. Glad you called
3. I can’t take your call
4. Let me know what you want
5. I’ll get back to you

Perhaps not everyone wanted to communicate all of the above things, but everyone at least wanted to communicate one of them.  In effect, we “programmed” our answering machines/voice mail to handle contacts from the world.

And my point in bringing up voice mail is that people don’t always want to be live or can’t always be live – yet, they still want to be properly represented.  In this case, voice mail is acting as their agent.

Jump to today and beyond:

Avatars are commonplace today on the internet.  Second Life and such virtual worlds aren’t the only place to find them though.  Any graphical representation of your person is a form of avatar – be it a picture, a cartoon, a stick-in-the-mud, or anything.  It is something that represents you.  And these are found everywhere – Myspace, mybloglog, digg, blogs, youtube, flickr, etc, etc, etc.

However, the real future of avatars is with a company called OddCast.  OddCast provides slick animation-synced-with-speech avatars.  They move, they talk, they watch what you are doing.  And they are capable of Text-To-Speech.

Imagine this scenario:

1. I purchase an avatar (customized to my liking) with Text-To-Speech option from OddCast.  I set up that Avatar to read a particular text file from my web server’s file system whenever a person views my homepage.
2. I then set up an application in which my daily activities, schedule, etc are stuck into a database.  I add to that an API calls to Digg, Technorati, flickr, and delicious to pickup my online activity for the day.
3. I write some logic to figure out what’s important, what’s current, and what’s relevant – pretty easy to do with timestamps and importance fields in the DB.
4. I create a job that writes the text file that the avatar will read, I set it to update every 15 minutes.
5. Now, whenever anyone visits my site, they will be greeted by me and I will be able to share with them what’s going on in my life right now.  The ultimate personal greeting.

But this scenario is just the beginning.  Ray Kurzweil’s avatar “Ramona” can answer questions.  Thus, when the tools to consume natural language become more ubiquitous, I too will be able to easily setup a database of my life, my writings, my pictures, my video’s, etc and serve it all up through my avatar. 

Avatars are becoming programmable.  They will soon be our programmable agents, just as the answering machine is today.

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What is Attention?

July 5, 2006 by Jim Parker in avatar

What is Attention?  Attention is Everything.

We all have a limited amount of resources.  Money, Time, Capital, and Talent are just a few of the more important ones.

It suffices to say that if you have enough of the above resources, you can do anything - which means you can do everything you ever wanted to do.  But what is everything? What does it mean to “do everything you ever wanted to do”?  That’s the key.  Everyone has a different definition of what everything is.  A retired couple defines everything as the mean to live a comfortable existence for 30 years or more.  A technical school graduate considers everything to be going to work in an auto repair shop, like his dad did, and earning enough to buy a big boat to hang out on the lake with his buddies.  To a homeless man, everything may be for the deli owner to give him a couple of special made sandwiches that didn’t get picked up and then to sleep under the stars in the park with 75 degree weather.

For each it is different.  And for each, the amount of resources required to pull it off varies greatly.

Ah, but there is one more resource to consider: “Your Current Situation” – that is, what you have previously used your resources to accomplish.  The tech grad has is education and a standard of living taught to him by his father.  The retired couple has been saving their entire life – a full and productive life at that.  The homeless guy has a relationship with the deli owner which he has nurtured.

How you define everything is a product of your current situation, what your resources are, and yet, one more very important thing:  “What you choose to pay attention to”.  Framed in this context, since you can’t do anything to change your current situation at this moment in time or to change your quantity and quality of resources at this moment in time, then truly, the only thing you actually have a choice in is where you direct your attention.¼br /> Thus, if you want to have everything you can think of, then you need to properly spend your attention – properly focus your time – on ways to get what you want.

The only difference between the homeless guy and Fred Wilson is, over a number of years, they have chosen to pay attention to different things.  If the homeless man paid attention to things like Fred Wilson does for a period of 10 years, he’d be more like Fred Wilson today.  He could be rich.  If Fred Wilson paid attention to the things that the homeless man did for a period of 10 years, he’d be more like a homeless man.  He could be poor.

Thus, Attention is the great Equalizer.  What you think about and what  you pay attention to are all that matters.

What are you paying attention too?  And what are you getting from it?

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Attention Grab Author

• Jim Parker
  I enjoy watching all of the changes in the world that are caused by us trying to figure out technology.
• Jim Parker