Immortal avatars: Back up your brain, never die
June 6th from NewZcientist
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.
June 6th from NewZcientist
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.
RSS Feed