#virtual avatars

Me going to their youtube channel: oh snap all their mvs are in anime style

Me scrolling further and realizing they even have the same avatar characters in their dance practice and live performance videos?!

I know this is bound to happen, it already exists with streamers/youtubers but beyond the use as aesthetics, it feels a bit weird to me that you never get to see the person behind the voices?

I'm all for creative mediums and creative expression, and anime vibes are fun regardless, the music sounds great too, plus I understand the appeal for artists / idols remaining anonymous (I love my privacy too).

It's just the whole living perpetually behind a virtual character is too sci-fi and eery for me bruh 😭 There was a webtoon I read a bit last year discussing this whole idea of virtual idols and to see it in real life already is just -- well, I'm not ready to live in the matrix just yet guys haha

I chose to go to  the "Creating Participatory Learning Through Performance" workshop of Mobility Shifts, and it was very interesting and inspiring.  Through the virtual interactive website "Second Life" , Sheila C. Johnson demonstrated how users interact with each others through the virtual world avatars. For the workshop, she showed us a specific example through dancing performance. Each users was controlling their own avatars, and interacted with each other by manipulating the avatars to do dance move.

It was fun to watch the demonstration. There's no gravity in second life's virtual world, so avatars were doing dance move that normally human weren't capable of. Sheila was explaining how this would become the future of Internet Users because most of us already participate such interaction through online game and social networking. After the workshop I was actually able to build my own avatar on the platform and do the dance move. At first, It was hard to control but I got used to it by following the advices from other avatars. It was an new experience for me because I don't play any online game at all, but it was like talking/playing/interacting with someone that sits next to you.