Category Archives: Technology

Real ID / Real Avatar

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Here’s an idea for the future – grown-ups playing dress-up online. Initially it would be for virtual social environments and virtual business environments.

It will depend on two other technologies becoming every day:

Real ID – an international, verifiable ID for online purposes. The sort of thing that could be used for online voting, and serious discussion forums etc.

3D Full Body Scanning – so that your avatar can be created. This already exists to make 3D models of small objects.

So, the idea is to enable people to use avatars in online 3D environments, but keeping their look close to reality. After being scanned, users can tweak their avatar as much as they like in terms of:

  • hair
  • clothes
  • skin color / complexion

Additionally, they can change one other part of their body, for example:

  • nose
  • breasts
  • butt
  • cheekbones
  • chin
  • biceps

You should be able to recognize someone in real life from knowing their avatar. But by changing the one thing that irks them the most about their looks/body, and giving everyone nice skin (tan optional), and an unlimited range of clothing and hairstyles, people will be tempted to play dress-up. With renewed confidence, while still being true to themselves, they will feel like meeting others in online environments.

It is perfect for online dating – singles parties. It could work for business environments as well.

With time the same technology used to capture people and represent them in cartoon form in movies should be available to consumers. Software and a Kinect device will enable your mannerisms to be authentic.

Car Cameras That Film The Driver

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This might be decades away, but it could be implemented tomorrow. This is what we currently know:

1. There is a trend towards black box flight recorders for cars. Cars can measure impact forces to determine whether the air bags should be deployed. It is simple to record such data. Police and now civilians are using video cameras that record what is happening in front of the vehicle – for use as evidence for who is to blame in an accident. GPS systems are also being used for trucks, so that in an accident we know how fast they were traveling just prior.

2. People are happily trading privacy for benefits, and with time we are allowing more and more of our private life to become data.

3. Many accidents are caused by inattention due to:

  • speaking on a phone
  • texting
  • opening / consuming food and drink
  • sneezing
  • lighting a cigarette
  • falling asleep
  • conversing / arguing with others in the vehicle
  • being on drugs or alcohol

In many places phone use by drivers has been banned. And of course so has being drunk. The obvious next target for the authorities is anything else you might be doing with your hands and distracting you. They might want to ban eating and drinking while driving.

A good way of proving if someone was distracted just before crashing is to film the driver. Like store security cameras it could be on an overwrite loop of say 5 minutes. That way, if people knew it would:

  • only ever be seen by crash investigators
  • only contain the last 5 minutes

they probably wouldn’t mind it being there. And such a device would be dirt cheap to deploy, the trick is to get it to stop recording when an accident occurs.