The Past, Present and Future of Online Identity

Author: Ready Player Me; Compilation: MetaCat

From chatting with strangers in early Internet forums to social media and multiplayer games today, our online identities play an increasingly important role in our lives.

Online identity can have many different meanings. For Amazon, online identities are the things we buy and the books we like. For YouTube, it’s what we watch.

Your Identity is: who you are and what you do. Your Visual Identity is how other people identify you. That’s what we’ll focus on in this post.

Ironically, the very first phone call made by Alexander Graham Bell contained these words:

*Mr Watson, come here - I want to see you. *

Our visual identity is an important part of our communication. This is how we represent other people’s identities in our minds.

With the rise of the internet, the need to express our identities has grown stronger.

How has our virtual identity evolved since then? More importantly, where will they evolve in the future?

the Internet

Online communication began with the advent of BBS (1978), Usenet (1980) and IRC (1988). Create the need to express our identities in virtual spaces.

Like everything else on the early internet, identities were represented in text. Username, alias, a string of characters that represent you in online social interactions.

Despite the simplicity of the visual representation, users feel a strong connection to their fictional identities.

A great example of this power goes back even further: arcade games. Players can choose a combination of three characters as a nickname to represent their identity in the game. Players spend countless hours and money just to get their name on the high score list.

On the early internet, users hid behind electronic masks of anonymity. You can be anyone. Their preferred alter ego, and sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re talking to a dog.

While anonymity is great in some ways, it can be terrible in many others. This is good because it makes you safer and more open. This is bad because it can annoy you, more on this in a future article.

Picons

In the 1990s, Internet forums became more visually progressive. The next step in representing our online identities is the Avatar. Personal avatar icons (picons), which users can upload or choose from a preset selection on online forums.

Avatars represent a user’s role, beliefs, and social status within the forum. It lets others know about your contributions without having to look at your username. It’s a more visual way to express who you are and interact with others.

social media

For a long time, it was uncommon to use a real-life identity on the Internet. Users hide behind a series of other selves they create for various purposes on the Internet. Using your real identity is creepy and dangerous, why would anyone upload a picture of themselves on the internet?

The rise of social media has changed that. Beginning with Friendster and MySpace, people began sharing their real names, pictures and interests with others on the Internet.

As it stands, there is no limit to the information about our lives that we can share virtually. Photos from vacations, photos of our kids growing up, our political/religious beliefs.

I won’t spend too much time on this point as this part is pretty clear already. Our online identities today are our social media profiles, curated life highlights. This is how other people on the Internet understand us, and how we understand others. Me on Facebook, Me on LinkedIn, Me on Instagram.

BitMoji

The idea of BitMoji is to use a personal Avatar identity to communicate online with the masses on your behalf. Snap acquired the company in 2016. It was one of the most downloaded apps in 2017 and now has more monthly active users than Snapchat itself. People are even using Bitmoji on their resumes when applying for jobs.

Not surprisingly, Bitmoji is also working on 3D counterparts to the original stickers, first in AR cameras and more recently in Snap Gaming.

Game Avatar

Games are the new social media. Kids under 13 spend more time playing and socializing on Roblox than on Facebook, YouTube and Netflix combined.

Fortnite has similar statistics. Its user base is even larger at 200 million compared to Roblox’s 100 million monthly active users.

These platforms have become the digital meeting place for a new generation. Just like the basketball court and skate park before it.

Fortnite rakes in as much as $200-300 million a month selling custom items for visual avatars, giving us a glimpse into how users’ real-life identities relate to their virtual identities.

VR/AR and Virtual Worlds

I believe that in the next decade, online communication will increasingly be dominated by virtual worlds. As Roblox and Fortnite exemplify perfectly, a new generation of tech-native users has grown up, spending more time in virtual worlds than traditional social media and entertainment.

Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus is also a step in that direction. They see the future of social media in gaming and virtual worlds and are betting on it.

VR/AR is more personal than video calling or any chatting, gaming. Meeting someone in VR feels like being in the same room together. This is something that no other form of virtual communication can provide.

Combine the immersive nature of VR/AR with a new generation of virtual world-native users, and we end up in an interesting place.

How will our identities be reflected in this exciting new world? Via a virtual 3D Avatar.

New World Identity

What will future avatars look like? Just like people, what do they represent?

One thing is certain, in the future avatars will be the way we represent ourselves online. We will be completely free to choose the visual representation of our choice. You can be a troll, you can be a princess, you can be yourself, or all of the above depending on the situation.

Personally, I think most people create avatars the same way they create social media profiles. Their avatars will be idealized versions of themselves. You can groom yourself if you want.

Just like in social media, we use different identities for different purposes. My professional (LinkedIn) profile picture will look like me in real life. My social (Instagram) profile picture can be an idealized version of myself. Maybe a little stronger and better looking.

Companies like Ready Player Me are doing just that. Build a personal 3D avatar creator that people can use to create their favorite avatars. Start with a recognizable base and give users the freedom to customize styling, appearance, and more to achieve the look they want.

There are a lot of interesting problems to solve in the new avatar ecosystem. For example: creating personal avatars, privacy and handling ownership of virtual assets, etc.

It remains to be seen whether these problems will be solved by startups or the current major social/gaming companies. But to be sure, it’s an exciting market.