avatar

avatar

In Hinduism, the incarnation of a deity in human or animal form to counteract an evil in the world. It usually refers to 10 appearances of Vishnu, including an incarnation as the Buddha Gautama and Kalkin (the incarnation yet to come). The doctrine appears in the Bhagavadgita in the words of Lord Krishna to Arjuna: “Whenever there is a decline of righteousness and rise of unrighteousness then I send forth Myself.”

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avatar

A graphic identity you either select from a group of choices or create on your own to represent yourself to the other party in a chat, instant messaging (IM) or multiplayer gaming session. An avatar is a caricature, not a realistic photo and can be a simple image or a bizarre fantasy figure.

Avatar is a Sanskrit word that means the incarnation of a god on earth, and this usage of the term came from the gaming and 3D chat worlds. See VRML.

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avatar

1. Hinduism the manifestation of a deity, notably Vishnu, in human, superhuman, or animal form

2. a movable image that represents a person in a virtual reality environment or in cyberspace

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avatar [′av·ə‚tär]

(computer science)

A virtual representation of a person or a person's interactions with others in a virtual environment, conveying a sense of someone's presence (known as telepresence) by providing the location (position and orientation) and identity; examples include the graphical human figure model, the talking head, and the real-time reproduction of a three-dimesional human image.

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1.	(chat, virtual reality)	avatar - An image representing a user in a multi-user virtual reality (or VR-like, in the case of Palace) space.
2.		avatar - (CMU, Tektronix) root, superuser. There are quite a few Unix computers on which the name of the superuser account is "avatar" rather than "root". This quirk was originated by a CMU hacker who disliked the term "superuser", and was propagated through an ex-CMU hacker at Tektronix.