Last month, when I posted an article on realXtend joining with OpenSim, I mentioned that one of the things that got me truly excited while reading the proposed feature list was the ability to directly script the avatar skeleton.

Here’s what I said at that time :

Ability to script avatar skeletons - Apparently inverse kinematics is on the feature list, but in addition to that developers will have the ability to script fine-grained control of the skeleton’s bones.  While it may not allow for everything that Endorphin would, it would seem to me that this could provide a great deal more spontaneity and interactivity between avatars than Second Life® ever could.   Note, this is not just .bvh animations uploaded like Second Life®, we’re talking scripted access to the skeleton!

What I didn’t know, and only just now found out from Massively, was that similar features have been on the Linden Lab® lab radar since as far back as last August (according to the Puppeteering wiki page), and according to Moo Money at Massively it’s been talked about in focus group sessions since 2006.

That wiki page mentions that scripted animation - the ability to control joint rotations and figure positions through LSL script rather than the simple playback of animation files - is on the agenda, and if they ever do in fact add that capability I can easily imagine that melee combat like Combat: Samurai Island will take on entirely new and fascinating dimensions.  Combine scripted spontaneous animation with physical avatars, and you have the foundational components for a level of combat interactivity that will truly blow away anything available in-world today.

In order to get a sense of the difference between what we have now and what this could mean for the future, take a quick look at this section from the AvatarPuppeteering website:

 The Physical Avatar

Techniques for animating avatars have come a long way, although they are still largely based on the linear narrative of film technology, whereby character animations are crafted beforehand using keyframing, inbetweening, etc., stored in a file, and then played using various triggers in the context of a dynamic virtual world. The animations look exactly the same each time they are played - which is of course desirable in the case of a feature film - but pretty useless in terms of spontaneous expression in an online world.

To accommodate the novelty and freshness of online virtual worlds, hybrid layers of procedural animation have been introduced, which allow the avatar to adapt to an unpredictable environment and to respond to user intent (although still to a limited degree, in my opinion).


Avatar Puppeteering introduces a completely physics-based means of naturalistically animating the avatar, in which every joint can be pushed, pulled, or rotated in real time for maximum expressivity and responsiveness. The underlying technology for Puppeteering is called "Physical Avatar" - it is called that because it uses forward dynamics to affect the positions of avatar body parts in the virtual world. This is explained in the sections below.

There’s a pretty cool though very limited video demonstrating in-world animation available on YouTube.  It looks to me like it’s mostly a ragdoll/kinematics simulation, but it’s pretty significant that it’s being done in-world rather than via third-party software like DAZ or Poser.

This is very encouraging news, and I’m once again excited about the potential of Second Life®   I can’t wait to get my grubby little hands on a technology preview!  Be sure to check out the AvatarPuppeteering website for more in-depth information and more videos.

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