We believe in hands-on product reviews. The use of avatars in learning has been steadily growing over the years as they are used as pedagogical agents – mentors, trainers, and guides – in eLearning courses. We listen carefully to the questions, frustrations and requirements of learning professionals and review products with those experiences in mind. This is a review of the service called LivingActor Presenter created by Cantoche.
Challenge 1: Good looking avatars
Some products on the market today are using sub-standard avatars. If the avatar is distorted or misshappen, your learners will spend time staring at it and thinking about how odd it is – instead of thinking about the learning. If an avatar is also too photo-realistic, you also run the risk of alienating your audience as the avatar falls into the Uncanny Valley. So, your avatars can be neither too poor nor too perfect. We found the LivingActor avatars to be comfortably in the middle. The avatars are attractive – but they are clearly avatars and not real people.
Challenge 2: Start up costs
We’ve heard from many of our colleagues that a barrier to entry in using avatars in eLearning is the cost associated with buying the software and then also buying additional packs of avatars, clothing, scenery, and accessories. LivingActor has an easy-entry price point. Their model is per usage. This spreads the cost of the technology, and puts the cost of rendering avatars on the individual users. We would also like to see an annual flat rate option – as we found that watching our credit balance drop every time we created an avatar made us hesitant to create a new avatar unless we were entirely sure it would be perfect. Since most people working with avatars are learning how to use them – it would be a relief to not think about cost after paying a flat rate – and just create!
Challenge 3: Computing requirements
As a web-based service, there is nothing to download, install or maintain. Also, the rendering (creation) of your avatars is done on LivingActor’s server – so you don’t need a high-powered machine. The impact on your IT department is – none.
Challenge 4: Learning the program
The process for creating avatars is simple and straight-forward. Navigation controls are found in intuitive places, are clearly labeled with what they do – and behave as expected. No annoying surprises here. It is simple to select from a variety of depths of view – head and shoulders shot, upper body and head shot, three-quarters body and full body.
Challenge 5: Matching body movement to audio
One of the most powerful features of this avatar creation service is it’s ability to automatically synchronize the avatar movements based on the sounds in your audio file. The LivingActor website can tell you more about the science they used to get to this point. What it means for most of us is that anyone on your learning team can create avatars – not just 3D modelers, programmers or Flash developers.
Demo
Below is a brief demo we built using LivingActor avatars and then bringing those files into Adobe Captivate. It shows you how an avatar humanizes the training experience. In this instance, our avatar is a trainer in a restaurant. You, the learner, are a newly hired restaurant host. Click the center of the demo to start.
To get a free trial of your own, visit LivingActor. The trial account comes with 10 credits for generating avatars with watermarks. Regular accounts produce avatars on your choice of background color, including transparent.
