So You're Dead Now? Entertain Us!

[Assurbanipal]

Oops, missed my cue, but chip chip and all that.


I'd go for the full funeral Mr Damned.  Black plumes on the horses (specify stallions eh?)

Me, I want the black marble ... everywhere... and a rosebush on the grave...

Assurbanipal

[GSOgymrat]

Intellitar avatars a poor substitute for afterlife

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-20022035-250.html?tag=TOCmoreStories.0


Of the products I've seen recently, Intellitar's Virtual Eternity is the most likely to make children cry.

It is a service, which recently released its beta, in which you create an AI-based animated avatar from a picture of yourself and the answers to a questionnaire. Why? So you can bequeath this cloud-based avatar to your descendants. They can then ask your avatar questions about your life, which it will answer by animating virtual lips on a picture of your real face, with a generic voice (unless you pay extra to have the service create a custom voice library from speech elements you record into the system).

The idea is to keep the virtual you alive long after the actual you has powered down for good. And no, I am not copying from the TV Guide description of "Caprica."

The problem: it's creepy. Both for me and the co-workers I showed it to, it elicited a visceral negative reaction. To be fair, I did not actually show it to any children, but that's because I can't imagine doing so. Even CEO Don Davidson acknowledges that his company's avatars reside in an "uncanny valley." That's the place on the spectrum of animation that lies outside the clearly drawn and clearly alive--and that freaks people out by being neither.

 
The head of my Virtual Eternity avatar bobs gently and realistically while it waits for questions to answer. However, it doesn't sound like me, my teeth aren't nearly that straight, and the avatar creation module couldn't handle my facial hair. It kept putting my teeth in the middle of my upper lip. I had to use this old picture of my clean-shaven self to get the product to work.

But, Davidson said, the technology will improve. The creepiness will be fixed.