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I think you are right on the money with your thoughts on virtual avatars. I've already noticed this phenomenon cropping up in some niches.

1. the phenomenon of VTubers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_YouTuber

2. in the virtual animal crossing late night show, Animal Talking, the presenter's (Gary Whitta) avatar doesn't really resemble how the presenter looks in real life https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Talking_with_Gary_Whi...

3. I watch a lot of interview s with people in VR Chat and it's very interesting how people seem to find it easier(?) to open up while they are embodying a character. https://youtu.be/KZWOXgc7PA4

Being able to experiment with identity in this way is really interesting to me, and I hope it becomes more mainstream with the proliferation of this technology

There's a Webtoon (it's okay but not great) that had a premise I think will turn out to be precient and reminds me of your last bit. The gist is that it's a future where everyone wears vr goggles. As a result, the teens in the comic all have personalized visuals mapped to their bodies that you can see if you also have your goggle's on when you look at them. The cooler kids even have full blown avatars that cover up their entire body and make them look like everything from aliens to elves.

This sounds a lot like the movie Surrogates, where at one point the protagonist notices the badge of a android surrogate is completely different from the human behind the surrogate (as printed on the badge).

Jaron Lanier’s book on VR went in-depth on the importance of avatars, and experiences people had embodying different avatars — particularly in the early days of first-wave VR.

I'm reminded of Permutation City where they talk to one another with virtual avatars that are able to mask emotional responses and such.

You just need to connect GPT3, and the dialogue is taken care of. Lyrebird’s API will take care of the speech synthesis.

Viola! My deep fake can stand in at meetings now while I code.

Imagine if everyone did that

Reminds me of this classic montage from Real Genius.

https://youtu.be/wB1X4o-MV6o

This is one of the themes brilliantly explored (in my opinion), in the (largely hard) scifi book "Lady of Mazes" by Karl Schroeder.

I posit that no productivity would be lost. Just have a summarizing AI email you the outcomes.

Hello, isoprophlex, I'm your Assistant AI

Today's meeting was an hour-and-a-half spent on bike-shedding the position--and color--of the "logout" button on our product page.

15 minutes were spent debating the resident usability expert who suggested white text on a dark blue background would be more readable for people with low vision. The department manager insisted on retaining pastel blue as it is his favorite color.

45 minutes were spent arguing over whether "logout" or "log out" comprises proper semantics. Our linguistic expert was unfortunately not able to attend as she was sent on a business trip earlier in the week.

The last 30 minutes were focused on team-building exercises as Bob doodled on his tablet and Susan smiled politely at the speaker whilst screaming internally as she had 3 more meetings to attend before her department could move forward.

That was... believable, haha.

WFH hasn't lessened the amount of bullshit, but it's become more tolerable. I mute my mic and put on a playlist with elevator music.

Now all I need is an AI standin and this summarizer and we've basically achieved universal basic income.

Next version would be:

45 minutes were spent by humans arguing over whether "logout" or "log out", while I created both buttons (GPT-3 can already do that) and A/B tested it.

GPT will also code for you.

Great, I can spend more time gratifying my limbic system while accumulating resources to survive my impending obsolescence.

But who's playing the viola?

Sorry, misspelled Voila!

> A nitpick, perhaps, but isn't that three orders of magnitude?

Perhaps the example was a best-case, and the usual improvement is about 10x. (That or 'order of magnitude' has gone the way of 'exponential' in popular use. I don't think I've noticed that elsewhere, though.)

As these trends sort of become more and more prevalent, I am so shocked at how David Foster Wallace had nailed this prediction in his book Infinite Jest.

Humans becoming more and more dependent on virtual face-to-face meetings and also relying on embellishment of their supposed appearance through the screen. It reminds me of how SciFi authors predicted technology, but with a complimentary commentary on human psychology.

Sorry if it isn't directly related to the post, but it is so striking to me.

The avatar thing isn't one-sided either: it'd be an awesome power to have to remake others!

Real-time silly hats for people I talk to and I'm sold.

"Visualize your audience naked." they said. "Helps calm the nerves."

They had no idea.

When there's a will there's a way

I imagine people in home office situations would like to use this not only for the background, but them-self. I mean, if you are in doors all day, you might not be perfectly groomed for the day - so faking that would probably appeal to many people.

I think the ability to, as someone mentioned it, have yourself look a bit tidier than you actually are (working from home) could be a huge benifit.

I mean taking away focus on things that doesn't matter in a virtual meeting such as: Where you are sitting - via Virtual Background Your daily hair style status or if you have a nose pimple - Via NVIDIAs AI showcased here. Would be great.

Though replacing yourself with a "digital" avatar I think takes away many of the benefits an actual live meeting provides.

It depends on how accurately the avatar is able to represent important information: emotion, attention, state of mind, etc. There's a lot of bandwidth in looking at a face (and bodylanguage as well), that's where the value in face-to-face meetings is.

>isn't that three orders of magnitude?

sure is .. if you stream your face at >30-50Mbit/s. For contrast highest bitrate available on Twitch, used for streaming high motion full screen updating twitchy 1080@60 gaming, is ~6-8Mbit/s.

David Foster Wallace predicted this in his novel Infinite Jest. Except they where static images inserted over a video phone, and the user had to keep their head positioned just right to make them work.

It's possible that the "order of magnitude" statement was the majority case, and the 0.1% statement was a best case scenario. So, 1 magnitude is to be expected, but 3 is possible.

My prediction is that people will just change their avatars as often as they change their personal fashion. For some that’s never and for others it’s every season or even more often.

"Its just easier to apply the <deep fake of myself> than it is to apply foundation. Its how I'd look anyway" - delusional early adopters probably

This reminds me of a sci-fi novel I read in the nineties. The premise had something to do with actors who took on roles in virtual reality where their bodies are fit with sense-points. They're cast in live-action role-plays with wealthy remote clients. They're basically deep-fakes in VR.

Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age had an element like that. It was even possible that the actors ("ractors") didn't necessarily know what they were acting in, just the general parameters and the next set of lines and actions necessary to continue the performance.

> A nitpick, perhaps, but isn't that three orders of magnitude?

I dunno that I'd call it three orders - it's close at about 830x - but it's definitely not even close to being one order either.

I think it’s an unnecessary nitpick. One statement is general and the other is a specific, extreme example. “usually 10x, sometimes 1000x”, that sort of thing

I think it is three orders of magnitude.

"An order-of-magnitude difference between two values is a factor of 10. For example, the mass of the planet Saturn is 95 times that of Earth, so Saturn is two orders of magnitude more massive than Earth."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

> "More precisely, the order of magnitude of a number can be defined in terms of the common logarithm, usually as the integer part of the logarithm, obtained by truncation."

    $ bc -l
    l(835)/l(10)
    2.92168647548360208478

That would make it 2 orders of magnitude by that method. Happy to accept that it's 3 orders of magnitude by the N=a*10^b method though. Either way, it's definitely not one.

I think the whole point of orders of magnitude is to be a back-of-the-napkin estimation of what's what.

"a new car is an order of magnitude difference in price compared to a used car" is appropriate even if a new car is 40k and a used car is 5k

Electric cars have two orders of magnitude less energy storage than gasoline cars, but newer ones are only one order of magnitude.

Since orders of magnitude are multiplicative, rounded to the nearest whole order of magnitude ~300× to ~3000× is three orders of magnitude.