Take care selecting an image to use in internet avatars, Angus Kidman advises.

Published in AustralianIT, March 18 2002

IT'S a well-known truism that on the internet no-one knows you're a dog. It turns out that nobody knows you're a Hindu god either.

Avatars -- named after a Hindu term for the physical manifestation of a deity -- are onscreen representations used by people in online chat rooms.

Rather than just using a name like Wild Oz Buffy Fan, you can incorporate an image that reflects your unique online personality.

Avatar sites, such as Romany's Realm (www.romanysrealm.com), offer literally thousands of ready-to-use avatars, although if you want to really stand out you'll need to design your own.

Join an active avatar world WHILE many text chat programs allow you to include a visual image to represent you, for the full avatar experience you need a 3D visual representation. One popular environment that supports this is Active Worlds. To visit Active Worlds chat rooms and gaming environments, you'll need to install the Active Worlds plug-in. To do this, open www.activeworlds.com in your web browser, select Products, Download and follow the onscreen instructions. The installation takes only a couple of minutes on a high-speed connection. Once the plug-in has been installed, you can select an avatar from the Avatars menu. In the initial world you visit, you have the choice of a male or female tourist, each of whom wears an especially tasteless Hawaiian shirt. As you visit other worlds within the Active Worlds environment, the choice available from the Avatars menu will vary. Incidentally, the default view in Active Worlds is first-person, which means you initially can't see your own avatar. To switch to a third-person view, select Third Person from the View menu.

Of course, a picture, while perhaps worth a thousand words, is still motionless.

The cutting edge of avatar design is in 3D representations, which allow you to move around elaborately designed worlds and interact with people you encounter there.

Actually, many of them won't look like people.

A large number of 3D chat communities have a decided fantasy bent, so be prepared to converse with insects, aliens and other beings you might suspect don't look anything like that in real life.

It's always fun to roam around a brand new virtual world chatting with people from Denmark, and adopting a new persona onscreen gives many people confidence they may lack in other social encounters.

However, avatars still suffer from some restrictions.

The most notable is that while you may be able to walk up to people in the virtual world, for the most part, when you want to interact with them, you're still stuck using your keyboard to type in your remarks while your avatar stands around looking stupid.

There are some exceptions, such as Traveler Communities (www.digitalspace.com/traveler), which support using microphones and headsets for real-time conversations, but such systems are unpredictable and can chew up bandwidth. Avatar communities can come and go with indecent haste.

Because the servers required to run 3D worlds are more demanding than those needed for basic chat clients, sites often disappear shortly after reaching a peak of popularity.

Using avatars is fun, but no-one has worked out how to make money from them yet.

The key challenge is finding a community where you genuinely enjoy meeting others. There are still lots of virtual worlds out there, but half of them seem to be empty most of the time, and far too many of the rest are filled with long-term residents looking to pick a fight with new visitors.

Of course, if you choose the right avatar, you may be able to avoid this fate.

So just make sure you don't dress your avatar as a dog -- or a Hindu god for that matter.