Why does the tail wag the brain? Why can't our avatars walk hand-in-hand? Will a nonverbal Babel fish save the world? Jeffrey Ventrella, a seasoned virtual worlds programmer and visual language guru, reviews the history of avatars, smileys, and other expressive forms, and considers a future of spectacular creativity. This book combines thoughtful scholarship with anecdotes from the trenches of Silicon Valley.

A pattern-finding journey through a shimmering universe of large composite numbers, this book starts with a simple graph of divisors and expands it into a vast visual sea of interlocking patterns. Why do mathematicians keep asking if there is any meaning to the sequence of prime numbers? Just think of the primes as the negative spaces behind overlapping composite patterns. The chaotic sequence of primes that pass through the Sieve of Eratosthenes is far less interesting than the Sieve itself! Did you know that the numbers in the range of nine quintillion have a hidden pattern (nested...

Why does the tail wag the brain? What is virtual autism? Why can't our avatars walk hand-in-hand? Will a nonverbal Babel fish save the world? Jeffrey Ventrella, a seasoned virtual worlds programmer and visual language expert, reviews the history of avatars, smileys, and other expressive forms, and considers a future of spectacular creativity. This book combines thoughtful scholarship with amusing anecdotes from the trenches of Silicon Valley. Virtual Body Language presents a thorough analysis of the neurological, linguistic, aesthetic, and technical aspects of how nonverbal communication can...