Hi Obama, it's Osama calling...

By MATTI POSIO
Hearst News Service

WASHINGTON _ Gone are the days when Microsoft asked consumers “where do you want to go today?” The next generation’s computer software slogan may sound more like “who do you want to be today?”

Just click the menu and choose.

In a few years, anyone could place a call on Skype, and the recipient would see JFK, Napoleon or Osama bin Laden instead, if that's what the caller wanted you to see. Anyone could pose as someone else.

The implications are dramatic. Not only could you use this technology for entertainment, it could be used by government spies, industrial espionage or image-stealing lawbreakers.

Another digital revolution is coming and it might make you feel exactly like Sam Worthington and his blue counterpart in the Oscar-winning epic “Avatar.” Once the newest motion-capturing techniques have been refined by video-game makers and Hollywood, the new technology will become increasingly accessible to ordinary consumers.

Experts liken it to the Photoshop revolution of the early 1990’s, which forever changed photojournalism and the arts. Some entertainment visionaries say that the Photoshop example will be repeated by easy-to-use, low-cost motion-capture tools in a the near future.

Mika Salmi, an early pioneer of video clips and short movies online, now a San Francisco entrepreneur and board member of several information technology companies, sees vast potential in real-time facial animation. He sees no reason why transforming humans into fantasy characters shouldn’t become a consumer application.

“Once you can render it well enough and make it realistic enough, without attaching anything special to the user’s face, you’re there,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have that in a year or two.”

After that, the possibilities for exercising the imagination will know few limits. Would you like to surprise your family by appearing as Barack Obama or, say, Tiger Woods in your holiday video? What about a video calling grandma about your visit to the hospital and looking exactly like Doctor Phil?

Steve Preeg---the 2009 Oscar-winner for special visual effects in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”—says that while he is skeptical about the use of fully automated motion-capture in quality cinema, he imagines it being used in lower quality on forums like Skype video calls.

As for Osama bin Laden, Preeg said, technology allowing simulation of his beard and hair remains more than a year away. “As for the whole of him, it might still be easier to find the real Osama,” Preeg said.

Salmi, who worked for MTV Networks and Viacom after selling his Atom Entertainment to the latter for $200 million in 2007, believes that the current YouTube and social-media boom could soon be replaced by a parade of familiar-looking avatars.

“For now, people seem to be more preoccupied with building their real identities on social media, such as Facebook or Twitter. Then it could be real-time avatars again, improved versions of Second Life,” he suggests.

Salmi, an adviser to Habbo Hotel, a popular avatar hangout among teenagers, admits that the outcomes of this new technology could go beyond practical jokes or just helping directors and video-game producers tell better stories.

“There can be significant military, intelligence and medical applications,” he said.

“I’m not the one to make predictions, but there are needs in the military and intelligence arenas to create images while hiding something else.”

Getting messages onto the lips of someone like Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein would, obviously, build momentum for spectacular reality shows. What if Osama’s avatar one day called president Obama’s avatar and said that he surrendered.

If we only knew which one of them was real.