So we got some news on one point of the Second Life Views program which is about the physical avatar (the topic about the participants were asked to be quiet about for one month) and it sounds quite promising. Actually Robin Linden posted about it on the Announcements Forum (you need to have a Second Life account in order to see this) and gave some details as well as some discussion points. Later she will also post it to her blog.
So here are the key features of the physical avatar project on which Ventrella Linden is working (quoted):
what is it?
“Basically this technology allows for in-world posing of avatars, and expressive puppeteering, along with physical, rag-doll effects.”
So what you can do with it (if I understand it correctly) is some in-world poser as a start by e.g. just holding CTRL and dragging your avatar in the pose you want it to be. Later they will add scripting capabilities and an animation editor. We might also see collaborative posing which might be handy for photographers who can then simply move their model into position (replace “photographer” by whatever you want 😉 )
What won’t be in there though at first will be facial expressions and fingers as the file format used right now (bvh) is not capable of storing this information. This might be added later by scripting (“could determine key points on avatars that let them sync up to shake hands for example”). This also means that it’s compatible with the bvh file format. It is not clear to me though if these poses can be saved in the first version and if so how (inventory of file system).
So this sounds like great news for the animation market (think of scripted animations) although people might be able to do their own poses themselves. But there will always be a need for good animators and for now it will also just be poses and not full animations.
No release date yet, though.
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Tao\'s Thoughts on Second Life 
An in-world Poser analogue would be slick, but FWIW there are simpler ways to move other willing avatars around precisely for photographs. I’ve found that a simple poseball script built into a phantom, transparent prim works pretty well. Have the avatar sit on it, then use the edit functions to move the poseball (helps if said pose ball is large enough to reach when an av is sitting on it). And if you make the replacement animation within the poseball the basic Linden “stand” animation, you can run whatever animations you like on top of it. (Or, of course, you can simply build the pose into the poseball script, assuming it’s a static pose and you don’t need to coordinate avatar movement.) I haven’t tried moving a physical avatar, of course, but my guess is it would be easier and more precise to edit-and-move a non-physical object. Grab-and-move with physical objects is imprecise and frustrating, and physical objects still behave according to gravity and momentum when you release them.
That’s right but nevertheless it’s cool to be able to do your actual animation then in-world. And also think of the possibilities to e.g. add handshakes etc.
Very cool, I say 🙂
little update: Tantric Sex will come later. Awww..
Something caught my attention here..
– allows more people to experiment with animations; poser anims are still superior
why would this be ?
if they release this in second life it will make roleplaying so much easier and the posabilities will be endless.