Avatar (computing)
Among people working on virtual reality and cyberspace interfaces, an avatar is an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual reality. The term is sometimes used on MUDs, and also in computer role-playing games. This definition has recently been applied to online virtual communities and Internet forums in particular, as a picture that a member/user of such a community/forum has elected to display alongside his or her contributions in order to represent him or herself.
Origin
Avatar was first coined the designers of the online role-playing game Habitat and was popularised by Neal Stephenson in his cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, where it was used to describe the virtual simulation of the human form in the Metaverse, a virtual reality version of the internet. Social status within the Metaverse was often based on the quality of a user's avatar, as a highly detailed avatar showed that the user was a skilled hacker and programmer.