fhapgood@world.std.com (Fred Hapgood) (08/14/90)
19th century photography is stills; 20th is film or video. A 21st century 'photograph' would be a highly realistic computer animation that captured the essence of the person but could be inserted into new (animated) situations. The animation would be generated by voice, movement, appearance, and discourse synthesizers all running in parallel. Each would be tuned to the style characteristic of the subject in that domain: his pitch and tones, phonemic pronunciation, physiogomy, gait, posture, body language, and conversational habits. I grant you some of the software problems here are non-trivial, but nothing in that list is technically _impossible_, right? Once you had this animation you would be able to 'test' it by placing it in different situations, different animated contexts and seeing how it would act and react. Eventually, after many years of development, these reactions would become more and more true-to-life. The animation in the computer would seem the psychic mirror-image of the physical original. This would be the 21st century photograph. Some questions: will these become real ghosts, keepsakes of the dearly departed? Will there be people who see them as gateways to eternal life, eternal youth? Will they become the center of a world religion?? Will the Mormons announce a project to develop and store animations of all their members? Will there be an issue of misusing animations? Of programming your boss to be gang-raped by a gang of street thugs? Or of living a dream life as one of the talented, famous, rich, and beautiful? Will people get off on watching themselves make passionate love with the most desireable sex objects on the planet? What kind of relationship will spring up between people and their dataganger? Will the original and the copy grow apart as they process their different experiences? Or will the virtual-reality technologies allow people to join their dataselves behind the screen so we will have experiences in common? Will the dataganger become the interface of choice for all computer functions (if I don't hear from myself I won't believe it)? The mind boggles.
sparks@corpane.UUCP (John Sparks) (08/22/90)
fhapgood@world.std.com (Fred Hapgood) writes: > >19th century photography is stills; 20th is film or video. A 21st >century 'photograph' would be a highly realistic computer >animation that captured the essence of the person but could be >inserted into new (animated) situations. sounds a lot like M-M-M-Max Headroom. I read a sci-fi book that dealt with such a phenomena as you describe. I can't remember it exactly, but I think it may be part of the Gateway series by Fredrick Pohl. Basically in that society, when you die, they take a scan of your brain and use it to program a computer model of you. This model is much like you describe, & has free run of a large computer, along with other models, and can create any given situation and stick himself in it. So it's kinda like immortality in a way, but you also get omnipotence in the bargain, at least as far as the model is concerned. I don't think this would be exactly a form of photography, as photography is more along the lines of capturing the real world on record for enjoying later. Not just people. This would be more like a simulation. I think the photography of the 21st century will be Holography. There is still quite a ways to go in that field. Maybe even motion pictures in Holography. -- John Sparks |D.I.S.K. Public Access Unix System| Multi-User Games, Email sparks@corpane.UUCP |PH: (502) 968-DISK 24Hrs/2400BPS | Usenet, Chatting, =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-|7 line Multi-User system. | Downloads & more. A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of----Ogden Nash