I am concerned by the fact that some major companies are proposing that in on-line meetings we should all appear to each other as computer graphic avatars. It’s not just a philosophical issue — it’s also about the devil in the details.<\/p>\n
One of the key elements of such an initiative is solving the latency problem. If I am going to appear to you as a synthetic avatar, then your computer needs to know what to do if there is any delay in network transmission.<\/p>\n
For video-based interactions (like what you see over Zoom), this is not such a big issue. We understand that networks can be unreliable and that sometimes a video feed can stutter.<\/p>\n
But you can’t quite do that with synthetic avatars. Instead you need to fill in the gaps with machine learning. You need to fake it.<\/p>\n
In particular, you need to synthesize body movements and facial micro-expressions to fill in the gaps. And those movements and expressions don’t necessarily fully correspond to reality.<\/p>\n
So that direction sends us down a slippery slope to a make believe reality in which the subtleties of people’s emotions are represented not faithfully, but rather as third party constructs.<\/p>\n
That might not be such a good idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am concerned by the fact that some major companies are proposing that in on-line meetings we should all appear to each other as computer graphic avatars. It’s not just a philosophical issue — it’s also about the devil in the details. One of the key elements of such an initiative is solving the latency … Continue reading “A slippery slope”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23876"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23876"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23877,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23876\/revisions\/23877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}