By Dick Pelletier
With all the switching between images in today’s sci-fi action
films, the audience does not suspect that faces and figures
appearing on screen are not always the real thing. It’s literally
impossible to tell if they are real or computer generated images,
digital concoctions created inside a computer at Sony Pictures
Imageworks in Culver City, CA. 
“We’ve reached a point where we can make every single thing
computer generated,” says graphics supervisor Mark Sagar in a
recent Wired Magazine article. The ability to do computer generated
everything, including human faces, has recently opened a wealth of
creative possibilities. Presenting accurate digital faces was the
final, crucial piece to the puzzle.
But the main benefit of digital actors isn’t replacing live
ones: it’s in creating scenes that are impossible in the real
world. “In the past,” says Scott Stokdyk, visual-effects supervisor
of the Spider Man series, “directors and editors were restricted to
cuts around different quick actions, and camera angles, to convey a
story. Now they don’t have those kinds of limits.”
Directors can follow synthetic actors as they swoop around
skyscrapers and dodge bullets. What’s more, actors can be digitally
aged, or de-aged, without having to spend hours in makeup. Some
speculate that digital actors could make real actors obsolete, but
most people believe there will always be a need for “real flesh and
blood.”
This amazing digital wizardry has fostered another technology –
interactive avatars. Driven by firms such as Microsoft and Honda,
lifelike avatars with compelling characters will be available for
home TV displays by 2015 or sooner.
Consumers will interact with their avatar to control house
temperature, lighting, and security; select TV and movies to view
or record on their DVR; and receive help
with e-mail and Internet chat room activities. Avatars will also
help us communicate with friends and relatives, and purchase
household items whether on the Web or from a bricks and mortar
store.
You will explore and participate in the digital world with your
avatar. You will interact with a sharp 3-D life-size image of a
character you created. Its design, temperament, and voice style
will all be of your making.
Avatars will become increasingly important in our lives,
developing a near human-like personality with compassion and
understanding of our physical and emotional needs. We will truly
become friends with our avatar.
We live in an exciting time. We can digitally simulate humans
down to the last detail. If we make a digital copy of a live human
look real, think what we could do with the deceased. How about
Sleepless in Hoboken starring a young Frank Sinatra and Audrey
Hepburn?
Also available in the near future might be a concept bandied
about by Microsoft a while back called Your Life Bits. This service
could gather information from friends and relatives to compile a
life story of a deceased loved one, which could then be programmed
into an avatar for you to interact with.
As holography techniques mature by around 2020, your avatar
could be allowed to jump off the screen and follow you around the
room; even give you a big embrace. In effect, you would be
digitally reincarnating your lost loved one. How’s that for a wild
twist?
As some might say – let the “magical future” begin.
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