Free Avatars .org

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Avatar - a Virtual Reality Icon or Symbol

Among people working on virtual reality and cyberspace interfaces, an avatar (sometimes AV or av) is an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual reality. The term is sometimes used on MUDs, in computer role-playing games, and shared non-gaming universes such as There, Second Life, The Palace, and The Manor.

This definition has recently been applied to online virtual communities and Internet forums in particular, as a picture that a member/user of such a community/forum has elected to display alongside his or her contributions in order to represent him or herself. Avatars have also become popular in Instant Messaging, and are sometimes referred to as Buddy Icons By Instant Messenger users.

Origin: The term "Avatar" was first coined by the designers of the role-playing game Shadowrun, the online role-playing game Habitat and was popularised by Neal Stephenson in his cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, where it was used to describe the virtual simulation of the human form in the Metaverse, a virtual reality version of the internet. Social status within the Metaverse was often based on the quality of a user's avatar, as a highly detailed avatar showed that the user was a skilled hacker and programmer.