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PART I — Foundations: What Is a Virtual Being?

Part I lays the conceptual groundwork for the entire study of virtual beings, moving from definition to historical trajectory to the deep idea of the avatar. Chapter 1 establishes the field by pinning down what a virtual being actually is and drawing the distinctions that matter—separating assistants, agents, and digital humans from one another, and marking how embodied, multimodal virtual beings differ from text-only chatbots and from physical humanoid robots, while probing slippery notions like "realness," presence, and credibility. Chapter 2 zooms out into a ten-part survey of the field's evolution and likely futures, tracing everything from who or what "inhabits" a virtual being (human versus AI) through technical modalities, testing, frameworks, ethics, the metaverse, and emerging technological pathways. Chapter 3 supplies the historical arc—how virtual beings moved from science-fiction concept to commercial reality, how AI transformed static virtual characters into interactive digital humans, and why they are becoming central to everyday digital life, framed around a pivotal inflection point and the broader "avatarisation" of humanity. Chapter 4 then digs into the avatar itself as a concept, examining its historical and even spiritual lineage (from digital simulation to embodiment), the role of anthropomorphism in how we relate to these beings, and the philosophical argument that digital humans are "real" in the same constructed-but-consequential way that money and private property are. Taken together, Part I gives the reader a shared vocabulary, a sense of where the field came from, and the core conceptual lens—the avatar—needed for everything that follows.

Chapter 1. Defining the Field

Chapter 2. The Evolution and Future of Virtual Beings (Series)

Chapter 3. Origins and Trajectories

Chapter 4. The Concept of the Avatar

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