Works like Cottingham's foreshadowed the appearance of the "avatar," the virtual—that is, digital—incarnation of a human being. Graphical avatars began to appear about 1980 as "game pieces" in rudimentary MUDS (variously rendered as Multiple User Dimension, Multiple User Dungeon, Multiple User Dialogue, or Multi User Domain), virtual spaces in which people could adopt computer personas and interact with one another. MUDs were at first limited to written dialogue and descriptions of environments, but soon they were being produced as elaborate audiovisual computer games. As the bandwidth of the Internet grew and computer processing speed increased, it became possible to transmit images, and online worlds began to contain images, and so avatars were born. Avatars are made up of a 3-D "wireframe"—a sort of virtual skeleton—over which a texture or skin is wrapped. This seems a particularly apt metaphor, as avatars are all surface, no more than skin.

Beginning in the 1990s, the Internet became home to a number of avatars. Readers of William Gibson's 1996 novel Idoru, which chronicles the career of Rei Toei, a Japanese pop star who exists only in virtual reality, will be familiar with the idea. Gibson was inspired by the scads of pretty teenage girls, called idorus, who were groomed into pop stars overnight (often without doing their own singing) by Japanese record producers in the 1990s. It was a small step for computer scientists, using powerful computers, to create virtual idorus. This was a case where fact was to mirror fiction, although none of the actual avatars that have been created so far possess the mysterious soul of Rei Toei.

Thus, in the same year that Idoru was published, an actual virtual idoru appeared on the Internet in the form of Kyoko Date, who released an album called Love Communication. Date quickly became a pop icon in Japan, giving interviews (her ambition was to be a private detective when she grew up) and appearing in music videos. Like all idorus, Date quickly faded in popularity, but her brief career suggested that people were ready to be entertained, educated, and instructed by avatars (whether they are ready to be led by them is a chilling question), and gradually others were "born": Ananova, a virtual newscaster; Mya, a virtual personal assistant; and Webbie Tookay, a virtual fashion model who, for a while, was represented by a prominent New York City modeling agency. In a culture obsessed with the ideals of female beauty, it is hardly surprising that in 2004, online beauty contests emerged featuring virtual models from around the world. Today, the availability and sophistication of digital modeling software has created an explosion of designers of virtual humans, mostly female, which are offered up for use in print and television advertisements. Predictably, the bodies of most of these computer-generated women resemble the flesh-and-blood models who inhabit popular culture. One such creation is Mamegal, the product of Koji Yamagami of Beans Magic.

A press release for Ananova, a virtual newscaster that debuted in April 2000, stated that "Ananova is the human face in front of Ananova.com's real-time news, information and e-commerce services. She responds with relevant emotions and actions to the information she delivers using real-time data files, text-to-speech technology and image-rendering techniques." Whatever Ananova is, she is not the “human face” of anything. And yet, is a photographically detailed image of Ananova any less a valid portrait than, say, a photograph of one of the blandly handsome men or women who read the news on TV? Perhaps the world of virtual avatars is merely a reflection of the race of flesh-and-blood avatars created by our entertainment-based culture.