MTV has partnered with Oddcast to provide avatar-centric Voki Playgrounds for some of their most popular shows.
Visitors to these so-called playgrounds (really just a fancy word for sub-sites) can create customizable avatars that mouth your recorded voice online. The avatars can be viewed on the sub-sites, emailed to friends, or embedded elsewhere like MySpace. Users are encouraged to create vokis for the shows Pimp My Ride, The Hills, and perennial favorite The Real World.
The avatars come from Oddcast’s Voki platform, which can analyze voice messages left by users and animate their avatars’ lips accordingly. It’s not very convincing, but it’s not meant to be perfect. If you want to respond to someone’s voki, you can do so by clicking on a button from within the voki widget.
While Oddcast already has a number of big-name clients, the MTV demographic is especially valuable in the avatar market – it won’t be long before we see these tricked-out avatars flooding MySpace. MTV hopes to eventually monetize the playgrounds by selling digital goods that will allow users to further accesorize their avatars, though a pricing model has yet to be defined.
This space is growing increasingly crowded with newcomers like Gizmoz and Fix8 competing with Oddcast, which has been around for nearly a decade. And while the new 3D animations we’ve been seeing lately are impressive, the likely victor will be the one that can target and monetize their avatars most effectively – a fact that makes this deal especially important for Oddcast.
Here’s a sample:
Thats pretty neat for the young people out there. It will give them extra exposure for their music or talents.
MTV has done pretty good with their web and video development over the last couple of years.
Great, another way to make our young people even dumber(er). They can now pretend they are little cartoon characters and talk about idolizing some of the biggest douche bags on the planet earth.
Do the world a favor Oddcast and make something that helps society.
Real World – grow a sense of humor. Oddcast is funny and the world needs laughter. It’s not like they are selling guns to kids.
Note to Oddcast: A talking douche bag would be a good addition to your avatars.
@Tim. I have a great sense of humor and maybe that comment was a little harsh. It’s really not even funny the garbage that MTV has and the immense popularity of its shows. The problem is that young kids these days live and die by what these people say and believe that this is how they should act.
With great power and influence comes great responsibility. MTV gave that up a long time ago and continues to be the biggest catalyst of stupidity for the young people of this country. This is really aggravating to me. I still don’t agree with any associations to MTV but I do agree a talking douche bag would be hysterical (screename: Summer Eve)
On the one hand I agree with Real World that MTV can be a fountian of idiocy, and yes a talking douche bag would be hilarious.
Personally I find the little talking avatars to be weird and annoying and it’s usually the first thing that I turn off when I get to a website that has them.
This was amusing for about 3 minutes then I wanted to stab somebody.
1. They can’t make a talking douche “bag” because their model is based on human anatomy. They’d have to design a new character maker (or make a generic template driven engine) with pluggable shapes, clothes, hats, etc. Unfortunately, all of that amount to designing “dress up this doll” Flash games, which have proven appeal only with 8 year olds, and apparently Eric. They’ve basically gone where everybody has gone before.
2. Their head movements are creepy, and it’s what people find weird about this type of model. People never move their heads like that when they’re talking. But if their heads don’t move then they look dead. If they move randomly, they’ll look weird at least 50% of the time (but that’s a generous estimate)
3. If they expect you to record your own voice then why not record your video as Seesmic was showing off the other day right here on TC. How much fun is it to talk in your own voice? Unless you’re Narcissus, I doubt that you like the sound of your own voice… More chances that you like your own face and so a video of yourself, heavy with digital effects, with some 80s computer synthesized voice would probably be funny/acceptable as a form of entertainment.
There is a way to do it right. People are just not seeing it.
Correction: “Jason” not “Eric” … You guys all look alike, especially in cartoon form.
GotVoice uses oddcast for voice messaging and it’s consistently funny. E.G. your boss leaves you a voicemail and you’ve assigned him an avatar of a talking hotdog. Hilarious!
And hey if they can make a hotdog talk then a douche bag would be no problem.
@Tim
GotVoice enabling your boss to contact you in the form of a hot dog assumes that you want to have your boss intrude into your personal space (as a hot dog!) and/or that you want to listen to your voicemail in any engaged way.
Most teenagers don’t.
OddCast, great idea – the only thing will be creating a Facebook app with the product that is viral and getting it in the hands of the influencers on MySpace for MySpace diffusion – get the people talking and the app will grow in popularity.
As for pricing models, what about advertisments rather than just some pricing model for objects? or is there an idea of secondlife-like customization in the pipes? such as manipulation of looks of avatars by users using autocad/photoshop tools ??
Marc – I wish I could listen to your comments via a talking hotdog (or a talking douche bag
Tim – You require no disguise. You easily pass for either.
We’ve used the Oddcast talking avatar to help people learn languages.
You can get the little animated figure to say the word over and over again till you can pronounce it perfectly – it would be hard to get a real person to do this.