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Avatar ​

Avatar covers how an Agent gets shown — in a window, in a virtual character, in an animation. The rule is simple: presentation can vary, but the Agent itself doesn't become a different Agent just because rendering changed.

This is an authority overview, not a complete public-product promise.

What An Avatar Actually Is ​

An avatar isn't just an image. It's a governed presentation layer for an AI participant. It can include the visual body, motion, events, what each carrier surface is willing to display, and backend-specific rendering branches.

Avatar is its own authority domain because presentation has to follow the agent's truth, not make up its own. If an avatar stops moving because the renderer hit a bug, that's a presentation problem — the agent itself didn't go offline. If a carrier shows a different look from what the agent's profile says, that's a renderer mismatch — the agent didn't change.

What Avatar Owns And What It Does Not Own ​

Avatar owns:

  • embodiment projection contracts (how the agent is projected onto a carrier);
  • carrier visual acceptance contracts (whether a carrier can display this embodiment under admitted shapes);
  • shell-specific rendering branches (Desktop avatars and other shells have their own admitted contracts).

Avatar doesn't own:

  • the agent's identity (Runtime owns runtime-owned agent participation truth and the live agent lifecycle);
  • the agent's memory (Cognition owns memory authority);
  • the world's social relationships (Realm owns those);
  • generation and execution (Runtime owns that).

This split is important. An Avatar surface that drifted into agent identity or memory authority would be a parallel authority, not a presentation domain.

Reader Scenario: An Embodiment That A Carrier Cannot Display ​

Suppose an agent has an embodiment definition that includes motion behavior the current carrier cannot render. Under the avatar contracts:

  1. The carrier visual acceptance contract decides whether the embodiment is admitted on this carrier.
  2. If the embodiment is not fully admissible, the carrier does not silently render a half-version. The contract decides what happens (fall back to an admitted projection, refuse, or signal a typed incompatibility).
  3. The agent's underlying truth in Runtime and Cognition is unchanged regardless of what the carrier does.

The presentation problem stays in Avatar. The agent stays the agent.

Reader Scenario: Why Avatar Is Separate From Runtime ​

Suppose someone asks why presentation is its own authority instead of a runtime feature. The reason is that presentation:

  • has to be projected differently across carriers (Desktop's avatar, potentially other carriers);
  • has its own visual acceptance posture;
  • can be debugged or replayed as a presentation problem rather than as an execution problem.

If presentation lived inside Runtime, those concerns would crowd Runtime's execution semantics. Splitting them keeps each domain's contracts focused.

Source Basis ​

Nimi AI open world platform documentation.

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