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

for the love of......

[Anonymous Coward]

great...now the only thing bigger than my ego is the ego of the entire world! I CAN'T WORK LIKE THIS!

I'll be in my trailer!

Adult Movies?

[mOoZik]

Ka ching! I'm sure every nerd...erm, guy, would like to play out his fantasies, at least with his head on some other guy's body. Forgive me if I completely misunderstood the blurb, but someone has to adopt this technology. For me!

Even more uses...

[nacturation]

Not only can you have your face rendered onto characters, but companies can hook into some global advertising database (eg: combination of Safeway club card, Airmiles, and other reward programs) and poll your shopping preferences. The characters can then sport jackets and shirts with your favorite clothing brand, drink from cans of your favorite soda, and drive your preferred brand of car. Oh, the possibilities are limitless!

Add in text-to-speech technology and maybe in the future they'll ask you to recite a few paragraphs so that the computer can learn your speech patterns, then the character will talk using your voice. Combine this with speech-to-text, and someone can have a video conference with someone else using your face and voice. They speak, it's converted to text, and then output as speech in your voice on the other end. Hello identity theft!

Re:strange..

[voice of unreason]

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.

This was tried years ago in videogames:

[bjbest]

At least 20 years ago I read in a gaming magazine about an arcade video game developer who recalled inventing a game that had a very advanced feature: the arcade game had a camera to make a digital snapshot of your face when you inserted the coins. Your face would be incorporated into your onscreen playing character in the game. Also if you were a highscorer, then your picture would appear onscreen between plays with the other highscorers. A prototype of the game were placed in an arcade to guage gamer interest.

All was fine until the top scoring player of the game exposed his genetalia to the camera. The arcade operator complained to the manufacturer that the machine, when not being played, flashed a big picture of a P3N15 along with the top ten scorers.

It just shows you that there always would be some smart ass who will try to screw up the system by throwing in something completely unexpected.