You can expand your chat capabilities through shortcuts, gestures, sounds and even words.

1. Hold down the ALT key and click on your avatar to Focus on yourself.

2. Move the camera around so you can see yourself from the front.

3. Hit the F2 key.

What happened?

4. One at a time, hit the F3 through F12 keys.

5. Now, one at a time, hit shift-F2 through shift-F12.

6. And now hit ctrl-F2 through ctrl-F12.

All of these motions, expressions, sounds and chat are preset -- but they can easily be changed in any way you want.

You can delete the ones you don't want, to free up F-keys for ones you do want. You can set up your shortcuts to chat any text you want. You can even upload your own sounds -- even your own voice -- and have your avatar say anything you want. The Gesture Starter menu on the chat bar is another way to activate gestures.

Let's look behind the curtain and see how this works and how to change it.

7. Press CTRL-G to open the Gestures window

As you've seen, you can activate gestures (and sounds and text) either through the F-Keys or by typing things into Chat.

The left column is where you enter the Chat Input -- whatever you want to use as the trigger to set off the gesture. You can put your Chat Input shortcut in the middle of a regular chat sentence, or use it by itself.

Chat Input is case-sensitive. That means if you set "Hi" as the Chat Input for, "Hello there! I'm pleased to meet you," this message will not be sent if you type in "hi" or "HI."

Notice that some of the Chat Inputs begin with a forward slash (/). This stops your avatar from performing the Chat typing animation while you're typing in your message. When you're chatting, this animation lets others know that you're busily typing away. But there are times when you might not want to play the animation -- like while dancing.

You don't need to have a Chat Input if you have a Shortcut Key, but it doesn't hurt to have both.

Speaking of Shortcut Keys, the next two columns are for choosing them. Your choices are all the F-keys -- except F1, which is for Help -- by themselves, and with the shift keys and the control keys.

That's a total of 33 possible shortcut key combinations you can use. But with the Chat Input, you have an almost unlimited amount of shortcuts for animations, sounds and Chat Output.

You choose the sound you want to play with the Sound pop-up menu. All the sounds in your Inventory are listed here. If you record your own sounds and upload them, they'll automatically appear here. You can upload an unlimited number of sounds, but they need to be less than 10 seconds long.

Animations are also chosen with a drop-down menu. Many animations are supplied, and more will find their way into your Inventory over time, so check the list every so often to see if any new ones have appeared.

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