""Physical Avatar" in First Look client

In this it sounds like the "Physical Avatar" feature is working to some extent and is compatible with current viewers. Personally, I'd be really interested to see what it brings to the experience and suggests for the future.

LSL-created BVH animations? Does that mean creating assets from LSL?

Sounds like they're talking about two different things. One is an in-world animation editor like a mini-Poser. The other is inverse kinematics to line up objects and joints in the client.

Is that really physical?

And this was posted the middle of last year?

LSL commands wouldn't be generating BVH animations/ assets but positioning avatars dynamically. That bit didn't sound like it had been implemented anyway.

They're two things enabled by the same system AFAIK.

Depends on your definition of "physical". It's not physical in the sense it's used in the SL interface, no, but it allows for implementation of features (rag-doll) that would be.

Apparently it's development was put on hold to concentrate on bugs/performance/stability.

I've talked about LSL-driven animations in the sldev mailing list. You really can't do any fine control over them, the latency problem is too great. A very very small subset of what people think of as "rag doll" animation would be possible by constraining joints to follow prims or matching joints in another av. Or just prims, by making the prim it's following an attachment someone else was wearing... which would also resolve a lot of the 'consentual' issues since you couldn't have someone grope you unless you were wearing a "grope me" prim that broadcast its UUID.

That's a good point, I guess the rag doll stuff they were talking about is mainly client-side.