Presenters: Robert Sharl & Michael Priddy, Birmingham, UK

Online Virtualised Environments provide new and flexible locations for human-to-human interactions, mediated through constructed avatars, and offer powerful and sometimes disorienting opportunities for identity construction, roleplay and subterfuge. This disconnect between identity in the physical world and presentation online clouds, but does not negate, the reality that behind the masks employed lurk human faces, human foibles and human imperatives. Though virtualised, the entities with which we interact in this prototype metaverse are almost always real.

On the more familiar hypertext-driven Web we are accustomed to dealing with individuals as components of (and representatives for) composite bodies: Companies, Institutions, and Communities all comprise real independent members, yet their consistency allows us to consider these collectives as single entities for the purposes of interacting with them (We telephone the bank, vote for the government, consult with management).

Software layers further resolve this appearance, establishing predictable and consistent behaviours through rules-based expert systems, or more emergent AI-like systems (What movies does Amazon recommend? What information can Google find?). Graphical User Interfaces solidify these into the realm of the physical, but abstracts human qualities within metaphors of the inanimate: Web 3.0 will go further to represent these instances of Hive Intelligence as tangible composite identities and to reinforce the notion of consistent logical behaviour, and while only some of these systems will present as human or animal forms, nearly all will exhibit the attributes of independent ‘thinking’ entities.

As the metaverse develops, the notion of identity in these new spaces will change, both diminishing the idea of the individual and validating it within the broader concept of composite identity. How we deal with a world populated by abstracted artificial and emergent behaviours, and how we design and architect for it, is the subject of the authors’ research.

Submitted by: Robert Sharl (sharl@mac.com) & Michael Priddy (priddy@mac.com)
Biography at http://sharl.backpackit.com/pub/319300