Sexploits of a Female Avatar

October 19, 2009 | Vetting explained

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iRocket

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Last updated: October 19, 2009

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The Greenlife Emerald Viewer by Modular Systems is an open source viewer for use with Second Life. Among its many useful features is one particular one that seems to specifically target women to exploit women.

Those familiar with the virtual worlds viewer are familiar with its rich set of settings and features that are used to enhance your "in world" experience. What many who use this open source viewer may not know is that there is a feature set up to specifically exploit women as sexual targets.

Although at first glance at the name, Greenlife Emerald Viewer, it appears to be an earth friendly or low carbon footprint type of viewer. There are no facts to support this impression however it has captured the attention of those who are earth friendly and energy/environmentally conscious.

As of Oct 16, 2009, Modular systems has announced they will be dropping the "GreenLife" portion of the name and the viewer will be simply known as the "Emerald Viewer".

Certain settings in the Emerald Viewer have been added to the "physics" of the inworld experience. This may have been the intentions of Modular Systems all along or it may have been added by request. Many of the forum posts on the Modular Systems website are specifically suggesting that physics settings be added to allow a user to view another avatar (secretly) reacting to physics.

In virtual worlds such as Second Life, real world physics such as gravity, wind, and force are added for realism. In the Emerald viewer, you can secretly adjust the physics settings to make another avatar in your view appear more real, specifically make the buttocks jiggle, the breasts react to movement or gravity, or the belly to move to and fro in a jolly fashion.

So far the developers of the Emerald viewer have only added and concentrated on the physics feature for womens breasts. Modular Systems has been approached for comment and have not responded as of this writing.

There are many "sexually explicit" activities in Second Life that the general public must avoid by knowing where not to go, and yet there is still the occasional "accident" when a user is displaying sexual content or activity openly in the general public. Although there are ways to curb this activity and certainly report it, this is confined to situations that occur "in world" by other users. What is important here about the Emerald Viewer is that the physics features in it are controlled by the person using it, and the effects are not viewed by anyone else except the person using the viewer.

This came to my attention when I was in a user group in Second Life and Mark Rothschild asked if everyone using the Emerald Viewer could see breasts bouncing as he could not see it and others could.

This reinforced the idea that the feature was being used to secretly exploit women. Mark is not alone in his quest to view women as sexual objects and to get the most sexual realism from generally stiff Barbie Doll avatars in Second Life.

The Second Life viewer was created by Linden Lab and many other viewers such as Cool Viewer and Kirstens viewer have all been feature rich and useful but have not crossed the line with features that have little use to the general public or catering specifically to the sexually oriented viewer.

Modular Systems decided to cross this line and incorporate code specifically aimed at the sexuality of women and allowing it to be secretly exploited by users of the viewer for their own sexual purposes.

When asked how useful this feature would be, and what would be the reason for using the feature, Mark responded, "for a laugh" and "hard to exploit sl [Second Life] where every girl dresses like a stripper anyway."

Others in chat suggested that it is simply for as much realism as possible in a pixel doll world.

Many viewers used for Second Life do an outstanding job of presenting "virtuality" (virtual realism) to the user experience such as shadows from objects and avatars, shine, glow, and flexible physics without targeting the sexual anatomy of the avatars.

I could not find a disclaimer or warning in the Emerald Viewer download or documentation to the user that certain features may require adult intervention or supervision. This is the only viewer that I know of that allows such exploits that can be used without the avatars in world being fully aware that they are being manipulated for specific purposes.

Have we reached a point in virtual reality where third party can manipulate your avatar against the will of the owner of the avatar? Once this border has been crossed, where will it stop? Is this a violation of your ability to control how you are represented by an avatar?

What would the real world implications be if such activity were allowed in the real world? In the real world people dress according to how they want to present them self to the public and have full control over how, what clothes they wear, what makeup they use, and all associated constraints. Using the Emerald Viewer is the equivalent of someone in the real world approaching you and adjusting your clothes so that your breasts bounce more or sway more or allow gravity to impose more (or less). Where do we draw the line?

iRocket

Posted in Assignment:
Stories from Second Life

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