Microsoft takes an interest in your fat Avatar
Microsoft patent details technology to make 360’s avatars have same physical appearance as their real-world counterparts, and thereby promote physical fitness.
(Gamespot) – Microsoft has shown a keen interest in boosting the Xbox 360’s status as a community hub. Leading this initiative has been Xbox Live Avatars, which offer a 3D representation of their owners on the online service. Now, Microsoft is contemplating tying real-world health and psychological data to said avatars in an effort to discourage many-a-gamer’s sedentary lifestyle.
Last week, Microsoft’s patent application titled “Avatar Individualized by Physical Characteristic” popped up in the US Patent and Trademark Offices’ online database. The filing details a way in which Microsoft can introduce a heightened degree of reality into the appearance of gamers’ avatars by utilizing a third-party health-care data repository (Microsoft gives Health Vault as an example) or a Wii Vitality Sensor-like device.
To incentivize people to improve their physical well-being, Microsoft’s filing notes that gamers will be locked out of certain components of a game or a chat room until the proper health parameters are met.
“Physical data that reflects a degree of health of the real person can be linked to rewards of capabilities of a gaming avatar, an amount of time budgeted to play, or a visible indication,” the filing reads. “Thereby, people are encouraged to exercise.”
“For example, a locally executed video game on a game console or other device capable of interactive play rewards players that have achieved a degree of health or athletic skill in real life, even if played in a solitary fashion,” the filing reads. “Alternatively or in addition, the degree of health can unlock additional playing time or can unlock certain aspects of a game, such as additional levels.”
Microsoft’s patent application might tie in with Project Natal, the Xbox 360’s forthcoming camera-based motion-sensing add-on. As part of its 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo press conference, Microsoft showed off how the device will scan a person’s body and represent it onscreen via physically proportionate silhouette. It also showed off several activity-oriented titles in development for Project Natal, including the physically demanding Ricochet, a 3D, full-body version of Breakout.
Microsoft’s filing goes on to note that it wouldn’t just be physical characteristics that could be refined. “The physical characteristics can be further extended to psychological traits associated with the physical person, including intelligence, religious beliefs, political affiliations, and hobbies that affect the rendering of an avatar,” the application reads.
The filing also indicates ways in which Microsoft can facilitate determining an individual’s mental health or mood. “For example, as a person utilizes Voice over IP to chat with a viewing person in the virtual environment, stress could be detected to gauge honesty,” the application notes. “As another example, skin resistance, pulse, and breathing could be detected to gauge mood.”
According to the filing, the data will be beneficial to individuals looking to “meet and become acquainted with particular types of people.” Microsoft’s application notes that while self-defined avatars allow people to “overcome shortcomings that would otherwise inhibit them, such as pertaining to self-consciousness,” there are those who would prefer to have “the cues that are available in meeting someone in person.”
Tags: Microsoft, Xbox Avatars, Xbox Live
January 4th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
[...] by geekgirlsrule on January 4, 2010 THIS has got to be some frat boy console-gamer* doucheface’s idea of a joke, right? Tell me it [...]
January 4th, 2010 at 10:44 pm
[...] Evidently this is (partly) why: To incentivize people to improve their physical well-being, Microsoft’s filing notes that gamers will be locked out of certain components of a game or a chat room until the proper health parameters are met. [...]
January 4th, 2010 at 10:46 pm
Doesn’t Microsoft realize that not all weight gain is related to obesity?
For example–I have congenital primary lower lymphedema tarda. Lymphedema is a condition in which the lymphatic system (essentially the garbage collector of the body) does not work, so that lymphatic fluid does not circulate properly and proteins and toxins are not removed from the blood as they should be. As a result of this, the fluid builds up in the affected area, causing massive swelling, split skin, celluitis, lowered immunity to everything, increased susceptibility to infection, and the gradual transformation of muscular tissue to fibrous tissue. And, since swelling increases weight and girth, it makes the affected person fat as well.
“Congenital” means that I was born with a genetic defect that causes this condition. Losing weight through exercise is not an option; I do eat healthy food (good diet affects the illness, after all) and I do exercise. I do yoga exercises to keep my legs strong and somewhat flexible; ease of motion is one of the first things that vanishes in this disease. For a lymphedemic, I’m in good shape. I can take care of myself and my house. I can walk, though I need a walker or a cane.
But my legs are swollen and heavy. I’m carrying around roughly eighty to a hundred pounds of excess weight in the form of uncirculated lymphatic fluid. There is nothing I can do to change that. It’s part of the disability.
I don’t appreciate Microsoft locking me out of games and chat rooms because I don’t measure up to the company’s arbitrary ideal of skinniness. How much I weigh or do not weigh is none of Microsoft’s business. And accessing third-party health care information for the purpose of a game is invasion of privacy on a level that I wouldn’t have believed existed.
And I don’t appreciate being locked into a disabled avatar that will limit my ability to play games, either. Hell’s bells, one of the advantages of the Internet has always been the fact that you could create a avatar for a game that was very, very different (and, dare I say, far healthier) from your real-life body.
I don’t want to suffer from the same limitations online that I suffer from in real life. Call me crazy, but I don’t consider that fun.
However, Microsoft, you have sold me on one thing. I will never get an Xbox or Xbox Live Avatars as long as I live. I will not support your invasiveness, your shallow insistence that fat is bad and thin is good, and your stubborn imposition of physical limitations in a non-physical world. Thanks, but NO thanks.
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