Editorial: The avatar revolution: Here come the new humans
ZOE GRAYSTONE is a girl with two brains. Only one of them is human: the other is an exact digital copy that has become conscious in its own right. When the human Zoe dies, her digital brain is implanted into a humanoid robot, effectively bringing her back from the grave.
Such ideas have littered science fiction for decades. Indeed, Graystone is a character in the American TV drama Caprica. But could such a tale ever become reality?
Though there is little prospect of creating a genuinely conscious robo-clone in the foreseeable future, several companies are taking the first steps in that direction. Their initial goal is to enable you to create a lifelike digital representation, or avatar, that can continue long after your biological body has decomposed. This digitised "twin" might be able to provide valuable lessons for your great-grandchildren - as well as giving them a good idea of what their ancestor was like.
Ultimately, however, they aim to create a personalised, conscious avatar embodied in a robot - effectively enabling you, or some semblance of you, to achieve immortality. "If you can upload yourself into this digital form, it could live forever," says Nick Mayer of Lifenaut, a US company that is exploring ways to build lifelike avatars. "It really is a way of avoiding death."
For now, Lifenaut relies on a series of personality tests, teaching sessions and uploaded personal material such as photos, videos and correspondence. The result, Mayer says, will be an avatar that looks like you, talks like you and will be able to describe key events in your life, such as your wedding day. But how far can such technology go? How much of your personality and knowledge can be reproduced by a computer? Can we ever hope to use avatars to resurrect the dead?
Like many people, I have often dreamed of having a clone: an alternative self that could share my workload, give me more leisure time and perhaps provide me with a way to live longer. My first step on the road to immortality is to use Lifenaut's website to create a basic visual interface with which others, hopefully including my descendants, can interact. This involves uploading an expressionless photo of myself, taken face-on. Lifenaut's software then animates it so my face can speak, wink and blink.
Right now this kind of avatar is rather crude, though other companies are generating much more lifelike representations that could be adapted for use by projects like Lifenaut. One such company is Image Metrics in Santa Monica, California, which specialises in creating digital faces for films and games.
Faces are particularly difficult to reproduce. For years, animators have struggled with a problem dubbed the "uncanny valley", in which a computer-generated face looks almost, but not quite, lifelike, triggering a sense of revulsion among human observers. "Systems which look close to real but not quite real are very creepy to people," says Dmitri Williams of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Image Metrics believes it has cracked the problem. The company's engineers record a series of high-resolution images of a person's face, each one with a different expression. Then they calculate the differences between these expressions using powerful mathematical modelling software. The result is pretty convincing. For example, the digital version of American actor Emily O'Brien, which the company unveiled at the ACM Siggraph meeting in Los Angeles in 2008, not only looks realistic, but can be manipulated in real time. "The movements are perfect. We can pretty much make Emily say anything we want," says Mike Starkenburg, CEO of Image Metrics.
At the moment the process is expensive: creating the virtual Emily cost around $500,000, so for now I'll make do with my primitive avatar and hope my grandchildren won't feel too repelled.
Making a human
How my avatar looks may in the end matter less than its behaviour, according to researchers at the University of Central Florida in Orlando and the University of Illinois in Chicago. Since 2007, they have been collaborating on Project Lifelike, which aims to create a realistic avatar of Alexander Schwarzkopf, former director of the US National Science Foundation.
They showed around 1000 students videos and photos of Schwarzkopf, along with prototype avatars, and used the feedback to try to work out what features of a person people pay most attention to. They conclude that focusing on the idiosyncratic movements that make a person unique is more important than creating a lifelike image. "It might be how they cock their head when they speak or how they arch an eyebrow," says Steve Jones of the University of Illinois.
Equally important is ensuring that these movements appear in the correct context. To do this, Jones's team has been trying to link contextual markers like specific words or phrases with movements of the head, to indicate that the avatar is listening, for example. "If an avatar is listening to you tell a sad story, what you want to see is some empathy," says Jones, though he admits they haven't cracked this yet.
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Superhuman
Fri Jun 04 10:59:43 BST 2010 by Eric Kvaalen
"Hanson says that the project's eventual aim is to exceed human intelligence, creating Mozart-like genius. "In a way we're looking for protégé machines," he says
I thought Mozart was human.
And shouldn't that say "prodigy" rather than "protégé"?
Superhuman
Fri Jun 04 11:02:35 BST 2010 by Eric Kvaalen
Wonders never cease. That's the first time an e with an acute accent came out like that for me on this site!
Superhuman
Mon Jun 07 09:08:57 BST 2010 by Allan Brewer
You are lucky you can get an apostrophe to work - for me is comes out as '
Superhuman
Mon Jun 07 09:11:34 BST 2010 by Allan Brewer
Ah - so it's just the previewer that doesn't like apostrophes!
New Scientist webmaster take note.
Copy?
Mon Jun 07 16:07:46 BST 2010 by lamorpa
And they think that 'I' am only the collection of my memories and thoughts? My, my, my, maybe they are.
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Monday 7 June 2010
Immortal avatars: Back up your brain, never die
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