Welcome to the Avatars Resource Center. An avatar is your online persona that you can use in virtual worlds, forums, chats, video games and more. It can be an animated 3D image, a photo, etc. In virtual worlds like Second Life, you can create a 3D animated avatar, customizing everything from the avatar's facial features to hair color to clothing, and use that avatar to navigate through the virtual world and interact with others. Start your search here for avatar tools, downloads, tutorials, documentation, books, articles, blogs, videos and more. In the Avatars Resource Center, you'll find links to:
- The tutorial, “Avatars! Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet,” by Bruce Damer.
- DoppelMe—a free tool for creating a graphical likeness of yourself or other people for use as an almost anywhere on the web.
- Voki—a free talking avatar that enables you to use your own voice.
- The best user generated talking avatar videos from Gizmoz.
- The article, “Avatars Everywhere: 27 of the Best Avatar Makers,” by Jordan Chark.
- The Mii Editor that allows you to create character avatars on your Nintendo Wii entertainment system
- Microsoft’s Ms. Dewey avatar for web searches.
- Over 3600 free avatars from Avatarcornor.
- The Moji free intelligent messenger (the first real-time 3D instant messenger).
- The article, "Avatars on the World Wide Web: Marketing the 'Descent,'" by Victoria Vesna.
- The paper, "An Overview of Universal Avatars," by Moses Mo, Dan Greening, Maclen Marvit and Abbott Brush.
- The article, "Outrageous Recruiting Using Avatars and YouTube," by Dr. John Sullivan.
- The Video Avatar tool by GeoVid.
- The Fix8 free interactive communication tool that animates expressions and movements in real-time over 3D avatars.
- Virtual worlds including Second Life, IMVU, Faketown and others.
- Avatars books, tutorials, sample chapters, FAQs, tools and downloads.
- And more...