Your Face On the Big Screen

blamanj writes "In another case of SciFi becoming reality, you can now star in an animated film as your FutureCast (tm) face-scan is edited into the picture in real-time. John Brunner, in his Hugo-winning novel, Stand on Zanzibar predicted a similar development in television, lampooning people sitting at home while watching travologues of themselves 'on vacation.' Brunner, in addition to being an excellent writer, had some spot-on predictions of a virus-laden Internet in Shockwave Rider. Fortunately, the predictions of his eco-dystopia The Sheep Look Up have not come to pass. Yet."

Comments

Re:On the topic of culture/media bending reality

[herbhork]

How the media shapes your world and the way you live in it

and the the On Point interview

Re:One way to shave off budget for big films

[Timesprout]

Well this has already been done before with promo material where movie star gets head stuck on a more appealing body, and some body shots in nude scenes use doubles, so its not like this would be an alien concept to movie execs.

Re:Adult Movies?

[tonsofpcs]

Yea, but you can do that with some nice compositing software anyway. :)

Re:Adult Movies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure you wouldn't like your face projected on to the girl's body?? Now that would give you a whole new perspective!

Naw, my weener is so small it wouldn't make a diff

science fiction

[gitana]

A similar idea is presented by Niel Stephenson in The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Stephenson uses the term ractive to:

describe a form of elite interactive entertainment, in which a live human performer (a "'ractor") working from a computer-provided script, improvises in real-time with paying customers, over a virtual reality network. This imaginary genre, a cross between improvisational theatre, interactive fiction, and mass-entertainment such as TV

Quoted from http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Ractive

Happy Birthday song origins

[Old Man Kensey]

Audacious wrote:

Think about the case of the "Happy Birthday" song played by Mozart centuries ago. You don't hear it in restaurants much anymore (oh, they have "Happy Birthday" songs but they are not THE "Happy Birthday" song). The reason? Some guy copyrighted it and the Copyright Office was stupid enough to give him the copyright. Even though the Copyright Office's own rules state that anything that pre-existed before the copyright laws went into effect could not be copyrighted!

Cecil Adams begs to disagree with you. (Well. Cecil doesn't beg. Rather the opposite, usually.)