Avatar interoperability and control in virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds (VWs), and especially the ones using 3D graphics content, have been massively developed and deployed over the last few years. Technological developments, both in hardware and software, bring up significant improvements in the areas of display, graphics, animation, distributed systems, network and mobile phones technology. These improvements allow almost every user on Web 2.0 to have a representation in different VWs. In those VWs, avatars have a specific place, representing a graphical appearance of human beings and a container for the users' specific data. Therefore, the need to reuse them across different VWs and across different platforms increases significantly. In this paper we are presenting a framework that allows interoperability of avatars between VWs. The proposed method consists of considering the avatar as a combination of a template and a set of characteristics that personalizes the template. The former, which is specific to each VW, can remain proprietary; the latter will be exchanged between the VWs. Therefore, the proposed solution is equilibrating the interests of end-users and VWs providers, allowing to not recreate an avatar for each VW and ensuring that user-defined avatars are consistent with the VW, technically- and businesswise.