VIRTUAL AGENTS
Move over, Ananova: There's a new computer-generated face in town.
This month, LifeFX (www.lifefx.com) rolls out Stand-Ins: photo-realistic digital human faces that, with text-to-speech software, read your email messages aloud - with feeling. In an ambitious viral marketing campaign, the Newton, Massachusetts, company will seed select email in-boxes with messages containing Stand-Ins. Recipients download LifeFX's media player to bring alive the virtual character, who can read email aloud, moving its lips and assuming facial expressions that match the content. The company is betting that users will then email the Stand-In to friends. Thanks to this word-of-mouth model, LifeFX hopes to distribute 5 million players.
Does the Web need another virtual assistant? LifeFX believes that its talking heads' biological realism will break them out of the pack. Some of the finite element modeling technology used to create the Stand-Ins was originally developed at MITand the University of Auckland in New Zealand, which has licensed its results exclusively to LifeFX. What began as a project to develop digital replicas of eyeballs to help train ophthalmological surgeons has been adapted to generate the physiological data with which LifeFX's virtual faces are built. The result, says the company, is a digital face that replicates the interaction of bone, muscle, and skin in a human face.
"You can't get truly lifelike digital images of the human face unless you take a medical approach," says LifeFX chair and copresident Michael Rosenblatt.
The company hopes to sell the technology to Web businesses that will employ the Stand-Ins as virtual salespeople and site guides. By next fall, LifeFX says, clients will be able to submit photos and have the images turned into 3-D virtual characters who read text.
"What's unique is how real the Stand-Ins look compared with the avatars on the Web," says CEO and company copresident Lucie Salhany. "It's the difference between Bart Simpson and Tom Brokaw."
Still, the Stand-Ins face some challenges in their quest to conquer the Web. The initial rollout will look better than it sounds - the Stand-Ins speak in the mechanical tones typical of off-the-shelf text-to-speech software. So far, the LifeFX media player works only with Windows, although Mac and Linux versions are planned. And though LifeFX's Stand-Ins may look more realistic than the average avatar, it's not clear that users are clamoring for virtual assistants to field their complaints. An incredibly lifelike virtual company representative telling you something you don't want to hear is still a pain in the ass.
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