March 18 2008 / by futuretalk
Category: Communication Year: General Rating: 19 Hot
By Dick Pelletier
Say goodbye to TV remote controls and the computer mouse and
keyboard. By as early as 2010 to 2015, a computerized image of your
choice displayed on wall-size screens throughout the house will be
available to hear your commands and speak to you in perfect human
voice. 
Selecting TV programs will be easy. Turn on any display screen
in the house and your personal avatar appears. “Hi Dick, what can I
do for you?” “I want to see Sunday’s ‘Desperate Housewives’.” “Here
it is Dick, and I won’t reveal the ending, enjoy.”
Avatars will also interface with PCs, which will signal the end
for most of our mouse-clicking and typing. Simply say, “Computer,
display last night’s email; good, reply to my sister, tell her
Friday’s OK; and invite the family to my house next Saturday for
dinner; now ring David in Japan on Skype.”
Most people think that interactive systems like this are a long
ways off, but two trends are quickening the pace. Improved
speech-recognition and interactive voice-response systems now mimic
normal-spoken language more accurately – and today’s computer
graphics can create 3-D avatars with an uncanny “real” look.
Honda, with help from IBM, will soon
introduce an incredibly efficient speech-recognition system that
allows drivers to get voice navigation guidance without having to
manually punch in information or take their eyes off the road.
And with the advent of multi-core CPU
architectures from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, Microsoft,
experts say, could reserve entire cores in future operating systems
exclusively to voice technologies providing it with enough power to
become the next decade’s “killer app” for PCs.
Nvidia’s Andrew Humbar believes his company will soon create 3-D
avatars made from 150,000 programmable triangles that can generate
realistic body images and facial expressions, indiscernible from
real people.
Although we have a way to go before avatars become totally
lifelike, they are working their way into our lives. Today you can
represent yourself with an avatar attached to emails and blogs. And
in the future, experts predict these clever images will not only
look and act like real people, but in some cases, they may even
outperform us.
At MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain
Research, scientists have developed an artificial intelligence
program that mimics the human brain in recognizing street scenes.
Forward-thinkers hope this technology will one day enable avatars
to achieve true human logic.
These wonder creations are popping up everywhere. In Japan, Yuki
Terai thrills as a virtual rock star and is a national idol,
Ananova gained notoriety reporting weather, and futurist Ray
Kurzweil created Ramona, an alter-ego that hosts his web site and
has performed live on stage.
In the next decade, avatars will help us buy and sell online,
become better educated, receive medical help, and talk with distant
friends. And real-life 3-D images on wall-size displays will make
us feel that we are in the same room with these amazing lifelike
characters.
Finally, as science fiction so often precedes real science,
Titanic Director James Cameron’s next film, Avatar, scheduled for
summer 2009 release, uses innovative graphics that could provide a
glimpse of how tomorrow’s avatars may appear, in what promises to
be a most “magical future” time.
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