Universal Avatars or Global Avatars
An interesting idea that I came across that I believe will certainly be a way to go: creating a global virtual identity for use in online virtual worlds, or even on the whole Internet: Universal Avatars or Global Avatars.
Right now you use a seperate avatar for every virtual world you enter, but why not put all shared aspects that all your avatars have in common into a single Global Avatar? It would certainly stimulate serious long term character development and in the end would result in a virtual you. Something that's worth a lot for company's I'm sure...
Wiki: Avatar
Global Avatars: BBC News
Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo
www.globalavatars.com
Global Avatars: Google Lively...3D avatars in online world!
This is an exciting new development: Google Lively! True 3D global avatars in your browser. It's still in an early stage, but I expect this to become huge. They'll probably allow you to import your own 3D object, made with their SketchUp application. Maybe then they integrate all this with their Google Earth data to eventually evolve to a true online virtual representation of our real lives, and real world. Doing this all at once would be a step too far indeed, but I already see where they're going with all this and it sure looks huge. Not to mention the huge amount of real life data Google will continue to gather when people continue to contribute virtual representations of all their personal aspects of life. Thinking of all this, you might wonder whether you really want such a company to know so much from you. On the other hand: will you be able to continue to ignore evolutions like this as they will become more and more mainstream? Just look at the huge popularity of WoW (World of Warcraft)...and that's just a game. Global Avatars are on their way, that's for sure...
Google Lively itself!
Slashdot on Google Lively
Google's Lively Blog announcement