Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Impressive unveiling by Linden Lab just now — real time puppetry for Second Life avatars:

We have been working on this feature for some time and now we are ready to open it up to the Second Life community for further development and to find out what amazing things our creators will do with this new technology… The codebase is alpha level and does contain its share of rough edges that need refinement, however the project is functionally complete and it is possible for the scriptors and creators of Second Life to start to try it out.

This is not just a lightweight "wave into your webcam and your avatar waves too" technology (which has existed for many years) but is meant to integrate much more devices — and the whole avatar:

We are excited about Puppetry’s potential to change the way we interact inside Second Life. For example, using a webcam to track your face and hands could allow your avatar to mimic your face animations and finger movement, or more natural positioning of the avatar’s hands and feet against in-world objects might also be possible.  Alternative hardware could be used to feed information into Second Life to animate your avatar – a game controller or mocap equipment.  There's a lot to explore and try, and we invite the Second Life community to be involved in exploring the direction of this feature.

What's even more exciting is that Second Life avatars recently got a Bento skeleton update, which makes them extremely articulate. You can see that in recent SL pics featured by Cajsa, where an avatar's fingers down to individual joints are highly expressive.

Read about the announcement here, and compare/contrast with VRChat's recently launched Avatar Dynamics project.

My immediate guess is that most Second Life users won't use avatar puppetry for most occasions — after all, gesticulating into your webcam or with a mocap suit quickly gets exhausting — but it will still be a huge breakthrough for live performers at music/dance/theater shows, along with conference presenters. And yes, for that other use case you thought of first.