Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne to be starring in a new upcoming movie !
“Impossible!” you say… “They are dead!”
Well, that won’t stop them anymore….

Virtual Reality (VR) is not much about robots, artificial intelligence, cyborgs or much else I’ve posted about so far, but it has been a fascinating interest of mine, and will play a huge part in the future of humankind and our way of life, and the recent article in the New York Times is a great place for this blog to jump right in. I’ve found the video link might link to an unrelated video, so here is another video link.

Basically, here’s the deal… Image Metrics is a company that specializes in animation and effects for digital media, and they have found a way to (in real-time), map a human “actor’s” face on to a virtual, computer generated character. This means that a computer watches the actor, and is able to see every raise of the eyebrow, crinkle of the nose, smirk on the lips, turn of the head, direction the eyes are looking, etc. Every facial expression and characteristic is then precisely imitated on the digitally created character on another computer screen.

Currently this can be done with the work of animators, and a lot of time, but now computers can do it without the need to apply green paint to the actor’s face, or anything else…. as WELL as be able to animate the character in real-time, saving countless hours of animation work. So, bring on the aliens, new animated movie characters with even more life-like expressions, ogres, talking lions, and such… now, at an even faster pace!

But wait!
There’s another side to this. Why stop at aliens and cartoon characters? Why not create a character that looks EXACTLY like Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Albert Einstein, Napoleon, or ANY other dead person. It could be done easily from old photos that have been taken in the past. Use them to create a 3-D model character, in just the same way they create a 3-D model of an alien, and then have a live human actor give their performance. In effect, Image Metrics is bringing back the dead!

We already have people who specialize in voice impersonations who could do the voice overs, or perhaps even digitize past recordings of audio samples from the real (dead) person, so that their own voice is used.

The end result is that the exact likeness of a person can now be reproduced, and in real-time.

There are some interesting thoughts from amosbray and his blog ‘destroyed’ concerning the use of dead people in new movies and ads.

I can only imagine what this might lead to, as the technology filters down to the common people, and consumer webcams, video cell phones, video editing software, and the like. You could potentially be having a live video phone conversation with someone who does not look like their image at all.

Putting potential ethic problems aside, movies and TV shows could continue to be made featuring people who have died, either recently, or long ago. It does not happen often, but how many times has a show had to cancel, or find and work in a replacement when a leading actor has suddenly died?

On a bit more twisted path, what if a wealthy business woman loses a child at young age, and then decides to have their child re-created as a 3D model character, and then pays an actor to fill the role. Where she could continue to meet and converse with “her child” through video on the internet? And, within 15 years or so the technology for artificial intelligence should be great enough, that perhaps no human actor would be required at all.

Of course, this will also has much more insidious uses. What if a Osama Bin Ladin continues to make new video tapes for 50 more years… whether or not he’s really alive or dead? Or a video tape is released where George Bush was “filmed” at a party and you actually see and hear him say “I really fucking hate those jewish niggers!”. Or a child predator learns little Johnny’s kid-phone number, and around lunch time gets a video phone call from “mom” saying “It’s okay to get a ride home from Uncle Fred today.”

As virtual reality and virtual worlds begin to play a larger role in more people’s lives, the ability to shape our image (or the image of others) in to anything or any one we want will indeed have a profound effect on how we live.

October 21st, 2006
Categories: VirtualReality . Author: rock808

No Comments

No comments yet.

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.