Hair in today’s 3D games for the most part ranges from average to pretty good.

However the promise of truly realistic hair – capturing the sheen, density, shape, color, shadows and movement - hasn't been realized yet. Why? The real challenge is the difficulty of modeling hair on todays hardware. Today it is too much heavy lifting to be able to simulate all 150,000 strands of hair on a typical head, so as to be able to display them realistically in real time. For pre-rendered CG movies this is less of an issue, and we have seen some stunning recent examples, for example Beowulf from Paramount Pictures.

In contrast, in real-time environment like games and virtual worlds, approximations have to be made which take a lot of CPU cycles for acceptable levels of quality. As a result, most games have featured relatively simple hair models (shorter the better!), which either move in simple ways - for example one ponytail moving while the rest stays still, despite all the complex action and animation as characters fight, dance and play.

It has only been in the past year or two that the first high quality hair effects have started to emerge in games. Famed Japanese studio Team Ninja’s has been the standard bearer in this space with their Dead or Alive Extreme Series, with rendered hair effects that take a big step forward to feel more natural and believable.

These types of games have only started coming out on so-called next generation machines, such as XBOX 360, PS3 and modern PC environments, and typically limited to fighting genre for now, where the number of avatars to be rendered on screen is low, usually only 2. We haven’t yet seen this level of graphical quality applied to virtual worlds or MMOs which by their nature have a lot more characters per screen.

What about on the net? On casual gaming and community websites today, there is little to no 3D avatar hair styling and customization. Just as game play and graphics in these websites tend to lag behind modern games, in the same way the transition to 3D for avatars and hairstyles hasn’t yet emerged on these sites.

Instead today there are a flock of good 2D offerings, that enable users to model different hair styles from a front on perspective. In addition to US sites, many of the early innovation in this space has come out of advanced Asian markets and in particular Korea.

These are available in download client programs or more recently, in integrated websites accessible directly from the browser - for example HairCody in Korea. Most have the ability to import your own photo onto the site, and superimpose it with different hair styles.

Different colors can be selected, and sometimes simple modification of the hair styles such as reducing length or some sections. To see it from different angles, you cannot see your own avatar but just pre-rendered faces examples. Some examples are Daily Makeover and Virtual Makeover.

If you choose to not use your own photo, you can see predefined example faces, either in more stylized avatar form or real models photographed.

Apart from hair, some also have ability to change cosmetics on the face, most notably the very simple but powerful site Taaz.

The effect is that you can get a good feel or approximation of hairstyles "look" on a 2D photo or avatar, although it's still 2D - you won't know how it will look from different angles, or see the hairstyle moving with your character.

So when will high quality 3D hairstyles be available on the web in avatar communities?

The answer, at least for the first steps will be – soon. Just like customizable 2D avatars have transitioned from game world to the web, the 3D avatar styling and hair will also start to be integrated into web communities, adding more fun and depth to the user experience. Watch this space..