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	TABLE OF CONTENTS Design Pointers Interview: Chuck Clanton Body Language The Design Process

Body language appears in two ways . . . autonomic and intentional. The autonomic nervous system is what keeps you alive, it runs your heartbeat and breathing. Avatars breath and move around slightly all of the time, just like humans. This makes them seem alive. Intentional expressions are driven by the intentions of the user. You can use the smiley language to smile or laugh or cry. In addition, if you use certain words like "yes" and "no" in your chat balloons, your avatar nods or shakes its head. In fact, we keep track of the emotional state of the body language you use and the level of attention based on how much you are chatting, and change the poses of the avatar continuously to make the ongoing body language of your avatar consistent with the conversation. And finally, there are many elements to body language that create social context. For example, when someone joins a conversation group, everyone looks at them briefly. This makes you feel acknowledged and welcome but is much too small a behavior to require that the user control it. So our avatars do these nearly subconscious social acts as part of their autonomic behavior, and it makes conversations feel much more natural.

The styling of the avatars went through several iterations. Our first avatars were very simple and cartoonlike and incredibly expressive. Cartoon faces can do things that real faces cannot. But they were so cartoonlike that it was hard to "inhabit" the avatar as yourself. We then made avatars that were much more realistic. This caused expressivity of the faces to suffer. So the final version you see today is somewhat less realistic and more expressive.

And just as the avatars are somewhat less realistic in order to be more expressive, we also added emotional expressions that are familiar but not realistic . . . what we call moodicons. I can send a big red heart from my chest to yours with the smiley language or cause yellow question marks to rise out of my head. We are all familiar with this language from cartoons, and it has a lot of emotional power that mere expressions do not.

Q: I notice that the There avatars move on their own during chat. Why is this? What did you have in mind when designing these animations? Have you done any play testing of player reactions to this low-level autonomy of their avatars? If so, how did they feel?

I did dozens of play tests as we progressed through the avatar-centric communication project. Of course, we tried many variants and found many dead ends as well as fortuitous discoveries. Social autonomic behaviors have a very significant impact on improving the sense of presence and welcome and involvement in the group. For example, if others look at you when you speak, you feel their presence and you are more likely to talk and feel involved.

Another element that bears mentioning is the camera. In most virtual worlds, there is a single, fixed third-person camera that trails your avatar and creates the experience of having a body in the world. However, in films, the camera is used much more expressively. Studies on the psychology of TV and film show that the bigger an image is on your retina, the greater its emotional impact. That's why the close-up shot in film is used to create emotionally powerful scenes. In There, we wanted social interactions to have similar power. So we created a cinematic camera for conversational groups. When someone uses a strong emotional expression like laughing, the camera cuts to their face briefly to give power to that expression. Play testing did prove that this was very powerful, but it could also be annoying. In large conversational groups, the camera cuts felt distracting, and we also noticed that most members used fewer emotions and focused more on chat in that setting. So, over time, we carefully tuned the context where camera cuts would be used.

We also gave users control over the camera so they could accept the default view on joining a conversational group, which shows everyone but is quite distant, or they could rotate and zoom the camera in to better see what they are interested in. So, for example, when seated in the audience at a stage, you can choose to have a close-up camera view of the people on the stage or of the audience or of yourself and your nearest neighbors. In some games, audience members may need to talk among themselves, which is best done with one camera, and then call out answers to someone on a stage, which is best viewed with a different camera.

The camera is one of the most powerful tools in There for creating social spaces and increasing the expressive power of body language.

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