Hamlet Au over at New World Notes has a blog post regarding a competition to design an avatar of Albert Einstein, the winning avatar will be used in Second Life to promote fundraising for the Institute of medical research Israel-Canada. Now if you’re interested in entering an avatar you need to get your skates on because the closing date for entries is 11:59pm eastern time on September 9th. There are three prizes available, USD$1,500 for first prize isn’t a bad offering at all. The full rules of the competition can be found here.
The competiton is for a good cause and has an element of fun but it’s the choice of such an iconic image as Einstein that interests me because earlier I was reading an article at Mediashift regarding how avatars appear having an impact on your own actions, the article cites a book by Professor Jeremy Bailenson and Jim Blascovich entitled Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution .. which is quite a mouthful, the article can be read here but includes claims that taller avatars can out negotiate smaller avatars and taller avatars give people more confidence for thirty minutes after they log off in real life.
These are interesting claims based on research and further in the article are examples of people who practice religion in Second Life and find avatars with male mannerisms more suitable, due to the flirty nature of female avatars, which may have some substance to it because it’s cleavage city out there at times and I’m not sure that people would pay enough attention to the words.
I myself don’t place much in the look of my avatar, as some people are happy to point out to me, but we don’t really see enough variety in avatars in Second Life in terms of overall looks, it really is the land of the beautiful people and more realistic shapes are few and far between, indeed there aren’t many mad professor looking Albert Einstein skins out there but if you’re looking to give a scientific speech then dressing down is probably more likely to help your message than dressing up.
I can recall a few months ago, possibly longer, time flies by these days, there was a discussion on a mailing list for educators regarding appropriate attire for teachers and lecturers and in many ways dress codes are ignored in Second Life in the name of creativity but how much of our view of someone is based on how an avatar looks as opposed to what they’re saying and do certain looks really help with negotiations and getting a message across?
At the end of the day we’re talking pixels here, but so much of our communication is based on the visual aspect, it’s an interesting subject in my view, although not one I’m likely to spend too much time pondering over, in other words I’m not going out skin and clothes shopping to negotiate better deals inworld!