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From: fhapgood@world.std.com (Fred Hapgood)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: personal simulations
Message-ID: <1990Aug21.120733.2752@world.std.com>
Date: 21 Aug 90 12:07:33 GMT
Sender: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu
Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die
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Approved: hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu


                 
19th century photography is stills; 20th is film or video.  A 21st
century 'photograph' would be a highly realistic computer
animation that captured the essence of the person but could be
inserted into new (animated) situations.

The animation would be generated by voice, movement, appearance,
and discourse synthesizers all running in parallel.  Each would be
tuned to the style characteristic of the subject in that domain:
his pitch and tones, phonemic pronunciation, physiogomy, gait,
posture, body language, and conversational habits.  I grant you
some of the software problems here are non-trivial, but nothing
in that list is technically _impossible_, right?

Once you had this animation you would be able to 'test' it by
placing it in different situations, different animated contexts
and seeing how it would act and react.  Eventually, after many
years of development, these reactions would become more and more
true-to-life.  The animation in the computer would seem the
psychic mirror-image of the physical original.  This would be the
21st century photograph.

Some questions: will these become real ghosts, keepsakes of the
dearly departed?  Will there be people who see them as gateways
to eternal life, eternal youth?  Will they become the center of a
world religion??  Will the Mormons announce a project to develop
and store animations of all their members?

Will there be an issue of misusing animations?  Of programming
your boss to be gang-raped by a gang of street thugs?  Or of
living a dream life as one of the talented, famous, rich, and
beautiful?  Will people get off on watching themselves make
passionate love with the most desireable sex objects on the
planet?

What kind of relationship will spring up between people and their
dataganger?  Will the original and the copy grow apart as they
process their different experiences? Or will the virtual-reality
technologies allow people to join their dataselves behind the
screen so we will have experiences in common?

Will the dataganger become the interface of choice for all
computer functions (if I don't hear from myself I won't believe
it)?

The mind boggles.