[NetBehaviour] OneAvatar

[xDxD]

http://www.neorealismovirtuale.com


OneAvatar connects your body to your Avatar in virtual worlds.

You and your Avatar will be finally one, sharing the same experiences 
even at physical level.

You get hurt, you Avatar gets hurt.

Your Avatar dies, you die.

(available for Second Life, World of Warcraft)



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Virtual Worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft address 
people's perceptions and sensorial domains in specific ways. By using 
(living) these worlds users experience emotions, sensations and 
perceptions to which they are used to or of completely new kind. Both 
types are "new" in the fact that they are created in the users by means 
of technological devices and digital communications related practices. 
This is a major trend of contemporary technology. Bridges across 
information, architectures, prcesses and the body are constantly being 
created at sensorial or even physical levels. Interactive systems, 
wearable technologies, prosthetics, technologies that are embedded into 
objects and locations, domotics, robots, artificial intelligences. All 
of these things go towards eliminating the possible dualities 
intercurring between what is organic and inorganic, of what is body and 
what is architecture, what is thought or memory and what is external 
information flow, what is a physical product and what is an immaterial 
service.
This is a very complex subject for discussion, and it represents the 
full 360 degrees of background that sits behind and at the base of 
"OneAvatar".
The project starts off from taking into account these new sensorialities 
and then brings them to an extreme to highlight frictions, possibilities 
and, most of all, new spaces for dialogue.
We are all, more or less, influenced by the emotional and processual 
practices connected to the use of networks and, specifically, by virtual 
worlds. Checking for new emails every 10 seconds; clicking on the 
"StumbleUpon" button to randomly see a new website for 3 seconds, then 
passing to the next one; the way in which we scan texts instead of 
reading them; the use of search engines; the ways in which we identify 
people on the internet; the way in which we read news and blogs and 
information. These are all things that are similar to other things that 
we experienced in "life_without_the_internet", but this resemblance is 
truly a partial one, as they can be characterized in ways that are 
dramatically different, and studied specifically. So much that they are 
being called "new tactilities", "digital senses", "augmented 
sensoriality" etcetera.
This is obviously true with regards to Virtual Worlds like Second Life 
and World of Warcraft. When we go to places, chat, interact, buy, visit, 
dance, have sex in these worlds we have experiences that we define by 
using names that are pertinent to the analog world, but that are totally 
different.
Two clear differences lay in the areas of the perception of the physical 
body and on the notion of identity.
We cannot get physically hurt in Second Life or on World of Warcraft, 
nor can we physically feel the sensations that we feel when we touch 
something/someone, when we lift things, move things, when we are hit, 
caressed, when there is wind or direct sunlight, when we dive int the 
water or when we fall down from the skateboard or get a papercut. These 
missing degrees of sensoriality are one of the main distinctive 
characteristics of the way we experience Virtual Worlds and centrally 
define such experiences and the ways in which we perceive them. The fact 
that it is not possible to get hurt and, eventually, die in a Virtual 
World creates a physical and perceptive distance from that experience, 
shaping social relations, interactions, world use, economics. This 
missing body, this sense of being freed from the responsibility of 
having a body that can get hurt, fall sick, break, die, suffer from 
pollution, bring a whole plethora of concepts to low levels of attention.
The ways in whch we define our identities in digital and virtual worlds 
enhances this scenario. To be able to freely define our identity 
represents a form of freedom, that is for sure, but it also 
"disconnects" us from the Avatar that we impersonate. Experience becomes 
real (as it can bear real efefcts that are relational, economic, 
political...) but theatrical, fictional. It is narrative, more than it 
is real.
OneAvatar doesn't have a moral/ethical approach to these issues. The 
project is aimed at establishing real connections running between the 
virtual worlds and the physical body, to examine the possibilities 
arising from these practices.
In the first production of OneAvatar, part of the NeRVi (Neo Realismo 
Virtuale) theories, a video shows a person during a session in the 
Second Life virtual world. The person wears a set of electrodes that are 
connected to the USB port of hs laptop. The device is controlled by a 
software that uses the libsecondlife software libraries to intercept and 
interpret the status of his avatar's virtual body, trasforming it into 
stimulations of the physical body.
When the user jumps off with his avatar beyond the edge of a tall 
building in the virtual world without turning on the "fly" mode, the 
software interprets this great fall as a traumatic event, and sends a 
high voltage shock to the player, that is, to all effects, electrocuted.
While this is a fictional setup, as the actual device only uses low 
voltage stimulations, such as the ones found in sport-related appliances 
and massage machinery, it creates a shocking representation of what 
could easily become reality: a deep connection running between analog 
and virtual bodies. With all of its positive and negative sides.