The latest update of High Fidelity, Philip Rosedale's upcoming Oculus Rift-enabled virtual world, has another new feature besides massive concurrency that's seriously impressive: Full body avatar recording which can be applied to an NPC.

"The recording takes what your avatar is doing and any of the attachments and records them all," as High Fidelity's Chris Collins explains it. "With all the movement trackers that are available, it is very easy to record avatars and then make them playback on whatever trigger you want. E.g. if an avatar walked into a room, make an NPC turn around and and start talking [to them]."

One powerful application of this technology is making NPCs in MMOs much more complex and interesting. Usually, NPCs move around in a very simple loop (if they move at all), but this recording feature opens up a means of making them behave in a much more complex, intricate fashion -- including and especially in large groups of NPCs: