Say so long to the travel and convention business:
If Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson are right, here is what's in store for you and your avatar very soon, probably within the next five years:
1) Without leaving your living room or office, you'll sit at three-dimensional virtual meetings and classes, looking around the table or the lecture hall at your colleagues' avatars.
2) Your avatar will be programmed to make a better impression than you could ever manage.
3) While your avatar sits there at the conference table gazing alertly and taking notes, you can do something more important: sleep.
[. . .]
Dr. Blascovich and Dr. Bailenson insist that 3-D conferences with avatars are nigh because consumer technology has suddenly caught up with the work going on in their virtual-reality laboratories in academia. These psychologists point to three developments in the past year: the Microsoft Kinect tracking system for the Xbox, the Nintendo 3DS gaming device, and the triumph on “Jeopardy!” of I.B.M.'s Watson computer.
“These three events have been paradigm-shifting for avatar conferences,” says Dr. Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. “Virtual reality scientists have been waiting for these events for decades — and faster than most of us predicted, the technology is finally ready for the living room and the cubicle.”
And soon after that, no doubt, a holodeck for every home. Can't wait to take that Paris trip in the morning and hang out at the Grand Canyon in the afternoon. Might be tiring, though, but that's what we'll have avatars for.
