Hometta’s Ann Chou has an answer for all of you Swamplot readers still wondering about those bizarre arm motions one of its characters was making in the promo video for H-Town, the online small-home plan-sales company’s new virtual environment. She was just — you know — chatting!

Amid the feedback on last Friday’s release of the H-Town preview has been a seemingly recurring question. “um – what is that lady in the kitchen doing?” asked a commenter on ArchDaily. Over at Swamplot, someone described the lady in the kitchen as a “humanoid” that “has taken to some sort of repetitive carrot cutting activity with a roll of drawings (presumably architectural drawings).”

They are indeed architectural drawings belonging to our architect avatar, the firstborn in a cast of characters from which you will choose when H-Town goes live. Then, you too will be able to gush with your fellow avatars about 48′ House’s U-shaped kitchen!

So that’s how you gush in H-Town?

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Which brings us back to the lady in the kitchen. When you communicate in H-Town, your avatar will type on an imaginary keyboard à la air guitar. You will be able to communicate in one of two ways – via local chat or global instant messaging (known as IM). Local chat occurs publicly between two or more avatars and is visible to any avatar within a given distance. Global IM occurs privately between two avatars and does not depend on the participants being within a certain distance of each other.

We want H-Town to start conversations—between visitors, between visitors and their builders, and hopefully even between visitors and the architects and designers who designed the houses they love.

. . . gesticulating wildly, all the while. Below, a few H-Town residents demonstrate the best arm positions for design tête-à-têtes in cyberspace:

• What’s the lady in the kitchen doing? [Hometta]
• Hometta’s Virtual H-Town, Where All the Houses Are Small and Modern [Swamplot]

Images and video: Hometta