Following Friday’s “Microsoft Bing and Virtual Earth” post, I wanted to add a bit from Virtual Worlds News, which discovered that Microsoft may be “exploring ways to make Xbox Live avatars more like their users.” citing their Microsoft’s patent filing describing:
“an Avatar generator for a virtual environment [which] reflects a physiological characteristic of the user, injecting a degree of reality into the capabilities or appearance.”
Patent application 20090309891 describes the new approach to avatar generation as follows:
An avatar generator for a virtual environment reflects a physiological characteristic of the user, injecting a degree of reality into the capabilities or appearance. Thereby, many of the incentives of the real world are replicated in a virtual environment. Physiological data that reflect a degree of health of the real person can be linked to rewards of capabilities of a gaming avatar, an amount of time budgeted to play, or a visible indication. Thereby, people are encouraged to exercise. Physiological data that reflect the health and perhaps also mood also improve social interaction in virtual environments. People seeking to meet and become acquainted with particular types of people are not thwarted by the artificiality of avatars. The physiological data can be gleaned from a third party health data collection repository, a healthcare smart card, a real-time physiological sensor (e.g., blood pressure, heart rate, blood glucose, peak flow, pedometer, etc.) [via 1UP]
