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What Is An Avatar?
There so many questions asked regarding avatars. Most of these questions
tackle the nature of this particular thing and the importance of avatars
to the world that is connected to it. In fact, avatar is a word commonly
used and heard but rarely understood.
When we talk about avatars, this word has come to mean “an embodiment or
a bodily manifestation of the Divine”. The word “avatar” is first cited
in the India’s ancient Vedas, which is the oldest and understandable
spiritual literature the world has ever produced. In the Indian word,
known as Sanskrit, Avatar means “the descent of God”. In this field of
understanding, there is what they call an “Avatara” which is referred as
a personal form of the Supreme Being and infinite such divine forms that
reside in an internal spiritual realm. Avatara, in the Indian tradition
is simply called an incarnation.
With this information alone – avatar as an incarnation – some helpful
hints to understand what an avatar in the world today exactly means. As
we all know, when we deal with incarnation, we are actually invoking a
Western conception characterizing a physical symbol which depicts or
illustrates an abstraction.
In this manner, we can therefore say that as an incarnation, avatars
generally show essential features as that of the thing being represented.
Avatars may portray human weaknesses such as grief and anger.
Given such knowledge about avatars, I can further say that as a word that
is commonly heard from most people especially those who are in the world
of virtual reality and cyberspace interfaces, avatars, from the concept
of the Indian tradition as an incarnation, is in fact simply refers to
pictures, drawings, icons or representation of a computer user in a
shared virtual reality. From this concept, avatars are graphical in
nature. The distinction of avatars from other symbols or icons is avatars
usually involve the illusion of movement, space, and physicality. In the
world of virtual reality, the avatars are used to express the user’s
identity visually, rather than just through written form of
communication. This further leads to the sphere of self-expression and
social interaction with the capacity to create a unique visual dimension.
As such, avatars contributed a major development to the world today. From
the earliest concept of Indian tradition and Hinduism as an incarnation,
avatars are now applied and used in the field of computing and technology
to symbolically show aspects of a particular person or group. Avatars
therefore generally feature some specific perspective of every human’s
personality.
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