Avatars have been a popular item with OLab3 authors for years. But while useful, they have had their limitations.
In our redesign of OLab4, we are now looking at the issue of avatar editors. There are many 3rd party options out there. Rather than reinvent the wheel, we think it would make more sense to have authors use these and then use the generated images.
What do you think of this approach? Have you found any particularly useful avatar editors or generators that you would recommend?
Good point. We have used a couple of simple avatar generators, but they are not great.
https://avatarmaker.com/
https://avachara.com/avatar/
Will be interested to see what others think.
What was the problem with the OLab3 avatars?
It was a cute little system, originally written in Flash and then migrated to HTML5 in OLab3. But as we all remember, there was not much variation in appearance.
Now, functionally, they did a nice job, because it was more important to have something that was quick and easy, and yet conveyed things like age, condition of the person, where they were. So these might be things that we should consider in recommending what alternatives to consider.
I received this post from Viktor Riklefs, whom many of you will know from other OLab related projects.
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Nice to hear from you. Regarding the avatars we have never used them in our labyrinths, preferring to insert the pictures of real people. But taking the modern trends into account, maybe the youth would like to see more of ‘memoji stickers’ type avatars when you can upload the photo of real person or make the face yourself using the instruments, and then have stickers in different moods and types of activity to choose from. My 8-year old son recently made whole bunch of these stickers for me:
I am not sure of their educational utility though, but it can help show emotions for sure that may be useful. I am also not sure if there are any open source scripts for generating those, but I am sure there should be.
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As Viktor points out, if an 8 year-old can generate decent looking avatars using such 3rd party tools, it encourages me that there are lots of options out there.
We have only occasionally used avatars in our work, and they have rarely been a critical part of our cases. Although potentially useful, I’d agree that using 3rd party editors makes much more sense than focusing development on building something into OLab.
We are now exploring how we might integrate more sophisticated avatar generator tools into OLab4.6 — for more information, see https://olab.ca/faceted-avatars/