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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."
would this need? is this going to be like some 4 frame per second redraw?
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Even Nerds get married!
*Besides the really vain, what use is there for this type of technology, it's kind of a "wow thats cool, now what" type thing.*
semi-virtual actors. the actor doesn't need to be a real person, yet he can be in 20 movies per year easily by using cheap acting students. or imagine terminator 5000: arnolds face returns.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Of course, we'll have obsessive loners substituting the face of their object of desire onto every porn reel they have, further fueling the obsession. Just what we need.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Corporation (1990) for the Amiga allowed you to put your face on the main character. You had to send a floppy disk and a photograph to Core Design.
I just read Stephenson's Diamond Age and it had the concept of fully interactive media. Instead of just overlaying a face over a static movie, 'ractives didn't seperate actors and viewers. The idea was that the 'viewer' would buy a ractive and would pay a different amount depending on the type of ractive. They would also be able to have other viewers join them or they could pay professional actors to fill in the spot. The system was flexible enough to adapt to whatever the people did (and probably had a rating system to get rid of trolls) so it combined the basics of a script with something like a MMORPG. As AI come closer to the Turing test, this might also take off as you buy 3d/VRML/etc client and join RPGs that concentrate more on the role-playing rather than casting fireballs. However, I don't think this kind of thing will really take off until it becomes open enough that anyone can write their own ractives instead of just joining a centralized server an follow someone else's script.
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Wired article as proof
Reenactment of crime.. it may be possible to use witness descriptions to create an animation of the perp's walk etc.
People who know him may find it easier to recognize that way.
Several years ago the Tech Museum in San Jose had a revolving 3-D scanner that would scan people's heads. After you got scanned, it created a 3-D model of your head with a full-color texture map (which looks really strange when flattened on a monitor because you discover that your face is only a very small part of your head). You then were given an URL that would work in other exhibits and let you download your face.
I wonder if its still there.... I wonder if I still have that file.....
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'd think the bigger money is when they can get enough info from just a photo. Then, Q Random Stalker can snap a photo of his lucky lady and put her into the movie he's watching.
I've tried reading two or three different Brunner novels, and I couldn't ever come close to finishing one. I'm not sure I even got through a single chapter. This, from someone who almost CANNOT put down a novel no matter how crappy it is - I've read some of my father's dreaded 'Mack Bolan' drivel (no, he's not the author - he just reads 'em, can't imagine why), and finished the damned things without giving up. Hell, I read Clive Cussler cover to cover. Ludlum! I made it through two or three of Robert L. Forward's heavy-on-the-S-weak-on-the-F novels - folks, I read Harry
Harrison's godawful DeathWorld trilogy (tripe-ogy?) in its entirety. But I can't do that with Brunner.
It's been years and years and years since I tried, and maybe I could do it now. I'm just not interested in trying again.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
This could actually be pretty cool for online games. You could be on a team with friends from out of town, and know who you were playing with. On the other hand, it could lead to some creepy deja vu if you see someone at the mall!
What does this button do...
Definitely, in fact it's briefly mentioned in the article. In case anyone hasn't read the book (no, seeing the movie doesn't count), in the society described in 451, the population is kept docile partly through television programs that are designed to distract from real life problems. The main character's wife watches a soap opera where the characters interact in an artificial manner with her, making her feel that she is a part of the show's television "family". This seems like a similar type of thing: give people the illusion that they're involved, without giving them any real choices to make or issues to think about.
I have no problem stopping a novel I don't enjoy, but I have to rank Stand On Zanzibar as one of the best sf novels ever; I think it truly deserves its reputation. I think in a lot of ways it created what would eventually become cyberpunk (not the technology aspect, but the near-future catastrophism aspect).
He did an excellent job of predicting huge bits of today's world...but don't forget, he based it all upon the work of Heidi and Alvin Toffler...The Shockwave Rider is named after the Toffler's "Future Shock"...and if Brunner is God, then they are the Mother and Father dieties of God.
ttyl
Farrell
Sorry if that offends you monotheists, I'm a Druid.
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Seems pretty much like now to me ?? !
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
In "Farenheit 451" Ray Bradbury talked about people staring in TV shows way beyond when John Brunner ever wrote about it. According to Amazon.com's scans of the copyright dates:
:-)
Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451
and
John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar
Sorry, Bradbury did it first.
In fact, given the dates, I'd say John read 451 when in school and the idea probably percolated for a while and then popped out later on. This happens all the time to people (song writers, story writers, etc...). It is also IMHO why Congress original set the 14 year coverage of copyrights with a single 14 year extension (if asked for). So that ideas could be discovered, used, and then rolled back into the seething mass of consciousness only to be spit back out later on in another, maybe slightly different, form. Copyrights which remove this plowing of ideas back into the general masses basically destroys everyone's ability to make new ideas or items. Because the one person who owns the original copyright can, presently, charge whatever they want for their copyright thus limiting the availability of ideas.
Do you think that non-original ideas (like the making of ice cream) can not be copyrighted and halt everyone's ability to do something? 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!
So go figure.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
A weak effort, given that the chapters are only a page or two long.
Maybe you should have given it more of a shot. The Sheep Look Up is, of the three Brunner novels mentioned, by far the best, and that's saying a lot--Stand On Zanzibar is pretty damned impressive as well. Sheep has a few clunkers in the prediction department (e.g. evil microwave ovens), but overall it's terrifyingly prescient. It covers pesticides becoming ineffectual, overuse of antibiotics in livestock feed, and a huge variety of general ecological failures. Brunner predicts the rise of organic grocery stores, the breeding of cannabis into strains with very high THC content, an African economic union (c.f. the African Union), oxygen bars, and a seemingly endless list of things we now see every day.
It's nice to see this book back in print. Far too few have read it.
Maybe soon enough. Water is actually a big issue in many places for the immediate future. We might have clean drinking water now in the US, but the current trend is to remove the "E" and the "P" from the EPA.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Actually, I would give the orginal credit for the idea of realtime scripting of yourself into the program you are watching to Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. There, you can purchase a unit for your TV-walls that inserts your name into the dialog in realtime. True, Ray Bradbury's system only dynamically added in your name, but how big of a jump is it to add in your image once you factor in that at the time he wrote, realtime image manipulation was not possible?