You may not be clear on what I mean, precisely, by an avatar, so let me clarify. For purposes of this discussion, an avatar is one of those little virtual humanoids you construct to represent yourself as you wander around a 3-D chat room or virtual world. When you first arrive in such a place, the standard operating procedure is for the site to assign you a personality-challenged avatar, a blank slate. Or maybe a porcupine or something. Then it's up to you to build yourself, using fun little ears and noses and eyes and hairstyles.
Avatars move, of course.
That's supposed to be the big fun of it. What a load of meadow muffins all of this really is, at least from my harried perspective. Heck, I go to enough parties in the real world to get my fill of that kind of action. Do something else with your time. We simply don't have the bandwidth or the processor power to make any of these worlds matter yet.