When virtual world engines are only built for male avatars; CW: long (over 10,000 characters, link to eye contact and mild female nudity)
There's a lot of talk about male-defaultism these days. You know what else is totally male-default? Avatars in 3-D virtual worlds. At least if they can be modified in-world instead of being monoliths like from places like Ready Player Me.
Almost everytime an avatar system is being designed for virtual worlds, it's designed with only adult males in mind. Eventually, someone will ask the question, "Well, and how do we make female avatars?" It'll probably be those who design either the avatar parts if the avatars are sufficiently modular or the complete avatars if they're monolithic. But this won't occur before the avatar system is finalised to the point at which it can't be substantially reworked anymore.
If you're lucky, female avatars get a somewhat slimmer waist. Or a pair of boobs, maybe only one that's being hinted at by a single bulge. If you're very lucky, they get both. If you're unlucky, there's only one hard-coded body shape, and all they get is more feminine clothing for the upper body, maybe even painted onto the one body shape that's available. In fact, you'll probably have as many "clothing items" for women as for men, all of which were designed by guys. All of whom are software developers with next to no sense of fashion.
Oh, and you get female-looking hairstyles, none of which are even shoulder-long. Well, except maybe for one ponytail that stands off so far that it has no chance of clipping into the body because the head motion is too limited.
Seriously, though: Even if your virtual world system is only planned for purely professional purposes, i.e. business, industrial, governmental, organisational otherwise, and extra care is taken that it will
never be used by anyone in their spare time, even then this won't nearly be sufficient. If you plan to hold formal (not necessarily as in business formal) events, it'll be even less sufficient. If it's supposed to be an all-purpose virtual world system, a "metaverse for everybody" that people
will use in their spare time, it'll suck completely.
I dare say that I've been using 3-D virtual worlds for longer than most of those who design them from the ground up nowadays. I've been in
OpenSim for five and a half years now. I've built both male and female avatars. So I know first-hand what it's like.
OpenSim's default avatar, which also used to be the default avatar in Second Life long long ago, is female. She is named Ruth. But she's based on an avatar system that's mostly geared towards male avatars, and her hairstyle is more of a mullet because this avatar system can't even grow hair over the ears, because guys don't normally wear their hair over their ears. She isn't even really pretty. She can easily be switched to her male pendant, Roth: A bit less shapely, no boobs, therefore abs and pecs, the hair is shorter, and the face changes a little.
Now, if you want to see what kinds of avatars people
actually make in Second Life nowadays, just look around
(content warnings: eye contact, mild female nudity) PrimFeed, the Flickr alternative created exclusively for Second Life users. These pictures were actually rendered in-world and not by an AI. They show actual Second Life avatars, often even daily-driver avatars, in actual Second Life environments.
Short hair? Long pants? Almost only on male avatars, if at all. And today's male avatars have even more chiseled abs than 22 years ago. And chiseled faces and chiseled everything.
Female avatars, on the other hand, are shapely like you wouldn't believe from a virtual world unless you've been there yourself. Big butts. Big boobs and
actual boobs. Dresses. Skirts. Bikinis. Lingerie. High heels, almost never under 15cm or 6 inches, sometimes even higher with platform soles. And: long hair. And with "long hair" I mean lush long locks, not just longer than male hair.
By the way: Nothing of what you see in the images was supplied by Linden Lab. Everything that the avatars and the landscapes consist of was made by users. It has basically always been the users who drove Linden Lab to refining Second Life's avatar system, often by working around its limitations and repurposing features.
Sooner or later, users with female avatars will demand three things for them. Male-centric avatar systems will be unfit to deliver either.
Long hair
The challenge with long hair is to not only make it look natural and, especially, keep it from clipping into the body. Extra challenge: If the clothes aren't simply painted on, keep it from clipping into the clothes when the head moves.
Of course, this point is moot if avatars can't move their heads. Which Second Life and OpenSim avatars can.
Skirts and dresses
This point is moot if avatars don't have legs. You know, like in Meta Horizon or (formerly Mozilla) Hubs.
But if they do, then even in a strictly business environment, I wouldn't too firmly count on all women being content with putting trousers on their avatars. They
will wish for pencil skirts.
Skirts and dresses will pose a whole bunch of challenges. None of them is to keep people from upskirting, especially if the camera can move independently from the avatar which it should be able to do in good virtual worlds. In fact, depending on how a skirt or dress is shaped, preventing upskirting can be quite trivial. So that isn't one of the challenges.
No, the first challenge is to rig skirts in such a way that the legs don't clip through them, no matter how the legs move. If you manage to get that done with one kind of skirt, try again with another nine kinds of skirts. Including a pencil skirt.
Think you got that pat down? Well, here's the next challenge: Rig them in such a way that they look good when the avatar is sitting. This is rather trivial with pencil skirts. Now try it with a circle skirt in such a way that the skirt doesn't stand off as if it's made of wood. Extra challenge: Try it with a 1950s poodle skirt. These are just about as unthinkable in virtual worlds as 50s-style corrugated stainless steel diners. Trust me, someone
will build the latter.
If you think it's smart to simply hide the legs from the skirt hem upwards so they won't clip, this will come back to bite you once the avatar sits down.
By the way: Even Second Life has never managed the former, and neither has OpenSim. And the latter is hit-and-miss with more miss than hit, and it works best with the old "painted-on" system skirt.
The cherry on top would be if skirts still flowed halfway naturally, and if skirts with a looser fit swayed with the motion of the avatar. This requires not only at least a basic physics model, but also a collision system.
High heels
Again, this point is moot if avatars don't have legs. But if avatars don't have legs, they'll be ridiculed. Yes, they will.
It doesn't matter how high the heels have to be. They don't have to be 15cm spike heels. Or 30cm spike heels with 15cm platforms.
So you want a virtual business environment first and foremost. Then your female users will wish for footwear that isn't men's leather shoes. And not ballet flats or Mary Janes either. Something with at least slightly raised heels. Just like they'll wish for pencil skirts; see above.
Okay, so you may manage to put high-heeled shoes on your avatar. Now, the first challenge will be to get the avatar's feet into the shoes. You know, the same feet that are firmly rigged into a flat position because that's all you need for male avatars (until someone comes and wants to cosplay Dr Frank N. Furter).
So you've reworked large parts of your avatar system to allow for other foot positions than flat? Good luck. Now adjust the avatar's Z position accordingly because the feet and the shoes are clipping into the floor. Ready to pump another few thousand man-hours into something else that you didn't take into consideration when designing your avatar system?
In Second Life and OpenSim, the former could only be solved in a satisfactory way by attaching different feet. Or, in the case of mesh bodies from Second Life, by giving it a whole bunch of feet in various positions and using a HUD to make the appropriate pair visible and the other ones invisible. The latter requires manual adjustment or some long forgotten trickery from almost two decades ago.
Finally...
I've read about four worlds and world systems that have tackled at least the former two points, namely by implementing a basic skeleton-based physics system that's a big upgrade in comparison to flexi prims in Second Life and OpenSim. Its big advantage is a basic collision model that makes hair and skirts (and anything else that needs it that you want to attach to your avatar) nicely flowy with little to no risk of clipping.
The thing is: Sansar was launched by Linden Lab as a kind of Second Life successor. That was at a point at which Second Life already had user-made, highly detailed fitted mesh bodies from various vendors.
High Fidelity was launched by Philip Rosedale. Also known as Philip Linden. The guy who invented Second Life in the first place and who led it for many years.
Well, and Vircadia is a High Fidelity fork, and Overte is a Vircadia fork.
This goes to show how virtual worlds are developed by people who have years upon years of experience with already existing virtual worlds and their users and creations.
And it goes to show that even reading Neal Stephenson's
Snow Crash (which, by the way, introduced the word "metaverse" as early as 1991) doesn't give you the knowledge that personal experience with and in virtual worlds does. For Philip Rosedale has read it, and it has inspired him to make Second Life in the first place. But it has not inspired him to add certain elements for building female avatars right off the bat.
Unfortunately, however, even being prepared for that won't necessarily save a virtual world: Both Sansar and High Fidelity are no more. But that wasn't due to their avatar systems.
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