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Your avatar, representing who you are in Second Life, is capable of a great deal of self-expression. Appropriately enough, a gesture provides you with the means to go beyond text chat, and show yourself off to the world. Odds are, even if you're new to Second Life, you've already seen some gestures used by other residents. In SL culture, many gestures are freely circulated, as they add a lot of spark to social situations.

WHAT IS A GESTURE?

A gesture is a complex action, a combination of animation, pose, text and sound. Once assembled, you can use a gesture by triggering it via text or shortcut key.

Think of a kung fu movie where a Shaolin monk shouts out a battle cry and busts into an array of amazing moves. It all seems so effortless, and you too, can assemble an automatic sequence to impress, amuse, and dazzle. It need not even be that sophisticated; gestures can be used in a subtler manner as well.

As mentioned, there are four fundamental elements that can be combined in a gesture. You can line them up in any order, and there's great flexibility to customize further.

Animation
Just what it sounds like, the animations or still poses are a part of Second Life on their own. There are already a variety of defaults provided, and your personal collection can be found in the Animations folder within your Inventory.

Sound
Likewise, in the Sounds folder of your inventory there are audio clips; maybe you've already uploaded some catchy snippets of dialog and brief bits of music yourself. (File Menu > Upload Sound)

Chat
Lines of text, just like the results of typing and pressing Enter.

Wait
These are pauses you can insert to momentarily halt the action.

USING GESTURES

Gestures can be organized inside the Gestures folder of your inventory. If you take a look, you may see that some are listed in bold and some are not. Bold indicates a gesture is ON and active and is ready to be triggered. You can change the status of a gesture by right-clicking on it and selecting Activate/Deactivate accordingly. Deactivated gestures are effectively turned OFF and won't respond to their triggers.

Now, let's explore some more!

Go to your Edit menu and choose Gestures. (You can also press Ctrl-G or right-click your avatar and select Gestures... from the pie menu). This displays your arsenal of active gestures. The buttons are simple - Trigger, Key, and Name at the top will sort the list in various ways. At the bottom, New makes a new gesture, Inventory shows the Gestures folder, Edit lets you modify an existing gesture, and Play (or double-clicking any gesture on the list) will trigger it. When you play a gesture, it'll turn bold in the list and say '(Playing)' next to it.

EDITING GESTURES

Click on New to bring up the gesture editor. This is where everything is put together. It may look overwhelming at first, but you'll get the hang of it with use.

Description - Simply more info about what this gesture is.

Trigger - Defines which text, when typed into the chat bar, you want to use to get your gesture going. For example, '/wave' could start a gesture where you smile and wave. Triggers are usually kept short for convenience, and they are case-sensitive. Also, triggers can currently only be single words.

Replace with - Underrated and very useful because while not immediately apparent, what this does is take whatever text you put in 'Trigger' and automatically replaces it with the output. For example, it's good for expanding commonly used abbreviations to save you time: type 'brb' and have it come out as 'Be right back!'. Since a big boon about gestures is to ease automation, you can see where this will come in handy! If you want the same text for input and output, simply make the 'Replace with' text the same as the 'Trigger' text.

Shortcut Key - Even faster than a text-based trigger, you can press the F2-F12 keys (but not F1 as that is reserved for this help information) at the top of your keyboard to trigger gestures. You can also add modifiers too, Shift or Ctrl keys, giving you plenty of shortcuts to assign.

Library - This shows the 'four fundamental elements of gestures'. Use them wisely grasshopper, and you will be a gesture master.

Steps - This is the 'timeline' of each part involved in your whole gesture, laid out so you can rearrange them as you please.

The following buttons, in the middle of the gesture pane, help arrange the order of steps..

Add >> - Inserts a new step to the right using the currently-selected Library item from the left.

Move Up - Moves a step upwards. Make sure to select a step to see this button as active.

Move Down - Moves a step downwards. Again, be sure to select a step to see this button as active.

Remove - Erases a selected step.

Preview shows you what a gesture does, and Save records your hard work. A new gesture, as you may have noticed, already contains some steps. Feel free to go ahead and press Preview to see what happens.

Pretty cool, huh? Please take a moment to play around with some of these controls to familiarize yourself.

But if you need something more orderly...read below for a more detailed Gesture tutorial!

A QUICK RUN-THROUGH - GESTURE EDITING

  1. From the Edit menu choose Gestures. Move the window to the side and use the camera controls so that you can clearly see yourself as well.
  2. Click New. The gesture editor opens. Notice some steps are already filled in as a template.
  3. Click on the first step, 'Start Animation: Wave' if it isn't already selected in the right panel.
  4. Underneath, click on the pop-up menu where it says 'Wave' and select 'Dance 4' instead. (This is one of the built-in default animations and will always be in this list.)
  5. Now click 'Chat: Hello, Avatar!' You can replace the text below. Delete it and type in something more appropriate such as 'I have become one with the gesture!' Press Enter to confirm; you will see the changes reflected in the Steps panel.
  6. Click Preview to observe your progress thus far.
  7. Click Animation on the left and then Add >> to make a new step. Again, select the pop-up under 'Animation to play', and this time, choose the colorfully-named 'Floating Yoga'.
  8. Click Sound on the left, then Add >>. Feel free to select any sounds you may already have. If it's grayed out, you can add a new sound like this.. go to your Inventory, then open the Library/Sounds/Gesture sounds folder. Right-click any sound, 'Soundtrack 1' for instance, Copy, and then scroll down to your My Inventory/Sounds folder. Right-click the folder and Paste. You'll see the sound appear within, and when you go back to the gesture editor and click under 'Sound to play', it should show up. Select it.
  9. Click Wait on the left and make another new step. You know how to do this now. Check 'time in seconds' and change '0.0' to '4.0'. Press Enter to confirm.
  10. With the most recent Wait step added, click the Move Up button. You'll see it slide above so the very last step is the Sound one.
  11. Click Save, then click Preview and look at what you just did. How cool is that?!

For reference, your final result should look like this:

Start animation: Dance 4
--- Wait: until animations are done
Chat: I have become one with the gesture!
Start Animation: Floating Yoga
--- Wait: 4.0 seconds
Sound: Soundtrack 1

FURTHER INFO AND CREATIVE IDEAS

Some additional points regarding gestures..

  • Important: Animations and sounds must be fully permissive (modify, copy, and transfer) to show up in the lists. If something isn't appearing, have a look in your inventory, and check the permissions.
  • Gestures can have either a text Trigger, a Shortcut Key, or both.
  • Active gestures starting with a slash '/' in the chat bar will be autocompleted. Typing a preceding slash also hides the fact you're typing from others.
  • A quick overview of your active gestures is shown at the far right of your chat bar, where it says Gestures with a downwards-pointing triangle. Click that pop-up menu and select any gesture. This is yet another way to activate them.
  • Default animations appear at the top of the pop-up list and are sorted alphabetically, custom ones appear below and are also sorted alphabetically.
  • While you can string many steps together, there's a limit to how much can be packed into a gesture. You'll get an error message when you try to Save if you have exceeded that limit.
  • Each gesture must have a unique Trigger and/or Shortcut Key. If you activate one which has the same as another, the previous one will be deactivated and you'll be notified.
  • In an Animation step, the Start/Stop buttons are for looped animations like still poses and repetitive dances. If you don't want your avatar to groove into eternity, put a 'Stop Animation' step for the same animation sometime after the Start one.
  • You can trigger multiple gestures simultaneously to mix and mash them up.
  • Use gestures as a way to add emphasis for keywords. For example, if 'Trigger' and 'Replace with' are both 'cat' and you have a gesture set to play a meowing sound with an animated swipe of your hand, every time you type 'cat' in a sentence, you'll exhibit this feline behavior. Similarly, typed emoticons like smileys ';)' can correspond with avatar body language. The Library/Gestures folder in inventory provides many stock examples of this, so check them out at your leisure.
  • Gestures can be connected to scripts. If you have scripts which use channel commands like '/1 activate', these can be triggered via gesture faster than typing the long way.
  • Since F2-F12 can be used as shortcut keys with the Shift or Ctrl modifiers, this allows for a total of 33 different gestures to be mapped to shortcut keys at the same time.
  • A Wait can be up to 3600 seconds (an hour).
  • Each Chat step can have up to 127 characters
  • Share gestures you've created with friends. It can be such a satisfying experience to trigger them one after another in a group. You know what they say about laughter being contagious!

/wavesgoodbye
/laughs