3-D Avatars Could Put You in Two Places at Once

FUTURE IS HERE
Through a 3-D avatar, you could always appear awake.
By JOHN TIERNEY

If Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson are right, here is what’s in store for you and your avatar very soon, probably within the next five years:

1) Without leaving your living room or office, you’ll sit at three-dimensional virtual meetings and classes, looking around the table or the lecture hall at your colleagues’ avatars.

2) Your avatar will be programmed to make a better impression than you could ever manage.

3) While your avatar sits there at the conference table gazing alertly and taking notes, you can do something more important: SLEEP.

(..)These moving and talking avatars would be computer-generated, and in that sense they’d be less photo-realistic than the images from Webcams that are already available on phone calls and teleconferences through services like Skype.

In “Infinite Reality,” they imagine a slacker named Dave who sleeps in while his avatar attends an 8 a.m. corporate meeting.

“Dressed impeccably in a digital Italian suit, the avatar was programmed to be a perfect participant,” they write. “It laughed at jokes (taking cues from voice inflection changes of the other avatars), nodded in all the right places, and dutifully recorded the details of the discussion.”

Read the Introduction Chapter excerpt from Infinite Reality

The new MATRIX AWAKE-SLEEPER